Anthropology (ANTH)

ANTH 001 Archaeology: Window to the Human Past

This course will introduce students to the methods and theory of archaeology by exploring how we turn archaeological data into statements about cultural behavior. We will discuss the place of archaeology in the broader field of anthropology and debate issues facing the discipline today. The course will rely on case studies from around the world and from many different time periods to introduce students to the research process, field and lab methods, and essential questions of archaeological anthropology. Students will have the opportunity to work hands-on with archaeological materials through visiting the galleries and working with Penn Museum collections.

For BA Students: History and Tradition Sector

Course usually offered in fall term

Activity: Recitation

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 002 Anthropology, Race, and the Making of the Modern World

Anthropology as a field is the study of human beings - past, present, and future. It asks questions about what it means to be human, and whether there are universal aspects to human existence. What do we share and how do we differ? What is "natural" and what is "cultural"? What is the relationship between the past and the present? This course is designed to investigate the ways anthropology, as a discipline, emerged in conjunction with European (and later, American) imperialism, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and the will to know and categorize difference across the world. We will probe the relationships between anthropology and modern race-making by investigating how anthropologists have studied key institutions and systems that structure human life: family and kinship, inequality and hierarchy, race and ethnicity, ritual and symbolic systems, gender and sexuality, reciprocity and exchange, and globalization and social change. The course fundamentally probes how the material and ideological constellations of any given moment shape the questions we ask and the knowledge we produce about human existence.

For BA Students: Society Sector

Taught by: Thomas

Course usually offered in fall term

Activity: Recitation

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 003 Introduction to Human Evolution

How did humans evolve? When did humans start to walk on two legs? How are humans related to non-human primates? This course focuses on the scientific study of human evolution describing the emergence, development, and diversification of our species, Homo sapiens. First we cover the fundamental principles of evolutionary theory and some of the basics of genetics and heredity as they relate to human morphological, physiological, and genetic variation. We then examine what studies of nonhuman primates (monkeys and apes) can reveal about our own evolutionary past, reviewing the behavioral and ecological diversity seen among living primates. We conclude the course examining the "hard" evidence of human evolution - the fossil and material culture record of human history from our earliest primate ancestors to the emergence of modern Homo sapiens. You will also have the opportunity, during recitations, to conduct hands-on exercises collecting and analyzing behavioral, morphological, and genetic data on both humans and nonhuman primates and working with the Department of Anthropology's extensive collection of fossil casts.

For BA Students: Living World Sector

Course usually offered in fall term

Activity: Recitation

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 004 The Modern World and Its Cultural Background

An introduction to the diversity of cultures in the world. This course is divided into two parts. The first briefly examines different models of understanding human diversity: ethnicities, religions, languages, political forms, economic structures, cultures, and "civilizations". Students will learn to think about the world as an interconnected whole, and know the significance of culture on a global scale. The second part is an introduction to area studies, in which we undertake a survey of the different regions of the world. We conduct the survey paying attention to the different aspects of human diversities, which we examine in the first part of this course. Students will acquire a greater appreciation and understanding of cultural differences in the more comprehensive social context.

For BA Students: Humanities and Social Science S

Course usually offered in spring term

Activity: Recitation

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 005 Great Transformations

This course explores the history and archaeology of the last 20,000 years from the development of agriculture to the industrial revolution. Why did people across the world abandon foraging for farming? How and why did cities and states develop? Why did societies succeed or fail? How have humans transformed themselves and the natural world, including the landscape and the climate? We will explore the methods that archaeologists use to consider these questions and analyze evidence for social and economic change from the Middle East, the Americas, Asia, Africa, Australia and Europe. In addition, students will have a chance to conduct hands-on exercises with artifacts from the Penn Museum during practicums.

For BA Students: History and Tradition Sector

Course usually offered in spring term

Activity: Lecture

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 012 Globalization And Its Historical Significance

This course describes and analyses the current state of globalization and sets it in historical perspective. It applies the concepts and methods of anthropology, history, political economy and sociology to the analysis and interpretation of what is actually happening in the course of the semester that relates to the progress of globalization. We focus on a series of questions not only about what is happening but about the growing awareness of it and the consequences of the increasing awareness. In answering these questions we distinguish between active campaigns to cover the world (e.g. Christian and Muslim proselytism, free-trade agreements, democratization) and the unplanned diffusion of new ways of organizing trade, capital flows, tourism and remote interaction via the Internet. The body of the course deals with particular dimensions of globalization, reviewing both the early and recent history of each. The overall approach is historical and comparative, setting globalization on the larger stage of the economic, political and cultural development of various parts of the modern world. The course is taught collaboratively by an anthropologist, an historian, and a sociologist, offering the opportunity to compare and contrast distinct disciplinary approaches. It seeks to develop a general social-science-based theoretical understanding of the various historical dimensions of globalization: economic, political, social and cultural.

This course examines how we as consumers in the "Western" world engage with musical difference largely through the products of the global entertainment industry. We examine music cultures in contact in a variety of ways-- particularly as traditions in transformation. Students gain an understanding of traditional music as live, meaningful person-to-person music making, by examining the music in its original site of production, and then considering its transformation once it is removed, and recontextualized in a variety of ways. The purpose of the course is to enable students to become informed and critical consumers of "World Music" by telling a series of stories about particular recordings made with, or using the music of, peoples culturally and geographically distant from the US. Students come to understand that not all music downloads containing music from unfamiliar places are the same, and that particular recordings may be embedded in intriguing and controversial narratives of production and consumption. At the very least, students should emerge from the class with a clear understanding that the production, distribution, and consumption of world music is rarely a neutral process. Fulfills College Cross Cultural Foundational Requirement.

This first-year seminar provides an introduction to the histories, cultures, and societies of Central and Eastern Europe, including Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, and the successor states of Yugoslavia. Through a selection of articles and essays written by anthropologists and sociologists and based on their extended fieldwork in the region, students will explore both the ethnographic method and the experience of everyday life during and after the communist era. Topics will include: popular music under socialism, food and wine, environmental concerns, the status of Muslim minorities, socialist aesthetics, public memory and cultures of commemoration, privatization, advertising, women's rights, gender and sexuality, emergent nationalisms, and the rise of income inequality and homelessness. All readings and assignments in English.

In less than half a decade, the idea that "nature" possesses inalienable rights akin to human rights has gone from a strictly theoretical concept to the basis of policy changes in several countries and U.S. municipalities. This first-year seminar will introduce students to current legal, political, ethical, and practical debates about the implementation and impacts of granting "rights to nature" in these different contexts. We will begin by examining how the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) supported citizens of Tamaqua, Pennsylvania to write the world's first local "rights of nature" ordinance. We will then go on to compare the politics of "rights of nature" cases in Ecuador, New Zealand, India, and Colombia. We will pay particular attention to the way biocentric constitutional moves may transform concepts and understandings of environmental justice and socio-environmental conflicts. In particular, how the recognition of "nature" as a victim of war may transform understandings of violence, and hence, approaches to constructing peace and engaging and reparative and restorative practices within the larger framework of planetary and community efforts to mitigate climate change. Lastly, we will explore the possibilities and tensions between community decision-making, the "rights of nature," and national level policies regarding the intensification of extractive activities and questions of territorial ordinance.

Taught by: Lyons

Course not offered every year

Activity: Seminar

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 045 How Our Environment Has Shaped Us

From our earliest ancestors to the recent warming of our planet, the history and future of humans is fundamentally influenced by our relationship with the world around us. This intimate connection makes it a necessity for us to understand how humans have used, adapted to, altered and are in turn affected by our environment. How has climate change affected the development of human society? How have people adapted to their environments in the past and how have they shaped these environments in turn? What does it mean to develop "sustainable" approaches to our environments over the short and long term? Environmental archaeology is the study of these questions. By the end of this course you will have the tools to interpret human-environment interactions in the past and the present, and suggest ways we can change our thinking and actions in the future.

Taught by: Bates

Course not offered every year

Activity: Seminar

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 053 Music in Troubled Places

In this class, we go beyond the headlines to discuss the history and cultures of peoples who have had to endure terrible suffering, particularly through ethnic conflict and civil war. We will focus on a curious phenomenon: populations typically defined as separate from one another (e.g., Israelis and Palestinians) often have a history of shared or related cultural practices, of which music is a prime example. We will survey a number of current and recent conflict zones and use music as a way to deepen our understanding of the identities and relationships between the peoples involved including through a consideration of my own fieldwork in Sri Lanka. Querying the very definitions of music, trouble, and place, the course then broadens out to consider how musicians have been affected by and/or responded to important global problems like slavery, sexual violence, climate change and other ecological disasters, like Hurricane Katrina. Regions to be considered in our lectures and/or readings include: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria (including Kurdish musics), Israel-Palestine, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Myanmar/Burma, Uganda, Sierra Leone, North and South Korea, the Marshall Islands, Cambodia, Mexico, and the United States.

Students are provided a general introduction to a country's history, politics, environment, and performance through a range of resources: scholarly literature, film, music, and online resources; with particular focus on sites, communities, and events included in the 12 day intensive travel to that country (either Fall semester Intro with winter break travel; or spring semester Intro with late spring intensive travel). Students are given guidelines for writing about and representing live performances and experiences of exhibits and heritage sites for journaling and are expected to produce a written/creative project at the end of the travel. The itinerary and specific course content will vary according to the travel site and focus of each class.

This interdisciplinary course introduces students to qualitative research methods and frameworks in the social sciences and humanities. The goals of the semester will be for each student to develop their own research proposal for a specific project that they could imagine pursuing over the summer or later in their undergraduate career,and to develop a web-based exhibit of one Penn-based research collection of interest. Students will be introduced to a range of textual, archival and media collections and databases available at Penn, with particular attention to South Asia and other specific regions of interest to course participants. The class will visit the Penn Musuem object collections and archives, the Art library, the Kislak Center for Rare Books and Manuscripts, Film Archives, and other special collections on campus, and meet with a representative from the Center for Undergraduate Research Funding (CURF). Students will learn how to frame an effective research question, situate it in relation to existing research, select the most appropriate methods for addressing the question, and develop an effective research plan. Each week students will be introduced to a new set of frameworks for analysis, see specific examples of their application drawn from anthropological, historical, and related scholarship and have opportunities to practice applying and evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of specific methodological tools. Students will also have the opportunity to identify sources of funding for summer research projects and prepare applications for these opportunities as part of the course. The course is ideal as an introduction to both the excellent libraries and research collections housed at Penn, and to a wide range of intellectual frameworks for engaging with these collections - a great way to kick off your undergraduate experience at Penn! Prerequisite: Topic varies by semester, see subtitle and Professor.

ANTH 086 Desire and Demand: Culture and Consumption in the Global Marketplace

Does consumption shape culture or does culture shape consumption? As even the most mundane purchase becomes socially symbolic and culturally meaningful we can persuasively argue that the concept of "need" has been transformed. Analyzing a variety of physical and virtual consumer venues, the goal of this seminar is to understand and to analyze historical and contemporary issues related to a culture of consumption. We investigate social and political-economic factors that impact when and how people purchase goods and argue that behavior attached to consumption includes a nexus of influences that may change periodically in response to external factors. Readings and research assignments are interdisciplinary and require a critical analysis of global/local linkages. The city of Philadelphia becomes the seminar's laboratory as we ask: how have issues of culture, consumption, and global capitalism become intertwined around the world?

Taught by: Diggs-Thompson

One-term course offered either term

Activity: Seminar

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 091 Sustainable Development and Culture in Latin America

This interdisciplinary course exposes students to the three dimensions of sustainable development -environmental, economic, and social- through an examination of three products -peyote, coca, and coffee- that are crucial in shaping modern identity in areas of Latin America. The course integrates this analysis of sustainable development in relation to cultural sustainability and cultural practices associated with peyote, coca, and coffee and their rich, traditional heritage and place in literature, film, and the arts.

This course relates anthropological models and methods to current problems in the Modern World. The overall objective is to show how the research findings and analytical concepts of anthropology may be used to illuminate and explain events as they have unfolded in the recent news and in the course of the semester. Each edition of the course will focus on a particular country or region that has been in the news.

This course is an introduction to the scientific study of sex in humans. Within an evolutionary framework, the course examines genetic, physiological, ecological, social and behavioral aspects of sex in humans. After providing the basic principles of evolutionary biology, the course delves into the development of sexual anatomy and physiology. Among the subjects to be explored are sex determination, the nature of orgasms, and the sexual development of females and males from birth to adulthood. The role of ecology and social life in shaping human mating patterns is also evaluated using ethnographic and cross-cultural materials from a variety of human cultures. In particular, the course examines why humans marry or pair bond, whether there is a biological basis of love, which biological and psychological factors produce jealousy. Finally, the course explores topics relevant to human sexuality today, such as the "hook-up culture", contraception and abortion, sex work, sexual transmitted diseases, and the ethical and legal dimensions of human sexuality.

This course concerns evolutionary processes using humans (Homo sapiens) as a case study. Through a study of the anatomical, genetic, and behavioral adaptations in our species, we will explain and explore our biology through mammalian, primate, and hominid evolutionary histories. Through evolutionary theory, we explore why humans are imperfectly adapted and not an end product of evolutionary change, and how we create and modify, not just respond to, evolutionary pressures. Through this approach, we gain insights into how and why our biology functions (and sometimes malfunctions) in the way that it does. Then, we will explore topics including human birth, growth, locomotion, reproduction, and diet as part of human biocultural adaptation. This course will involve the analysis of hominid fossil casts and human skeletal material from the Penn Museum Physical Anthropology section.

Taught by: Mitchell

Course not offered every year

Activity: Lecture

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 109 Anthropology of the Senses

Smelling, seeing, hearing, tasting, and touching are the foundation of our empirical knowledge of the world, providing the most basic information we have. These senses are biological yet our sense perception how we see, smell, taste, hear, and touch is both shaped by and shapes our different cultures. As a result, they provide a useful framework to investigate a classic problem in anthropology, the intersection between biology and culture. This class investigates the senses as cultural and historical phenomena, drawing on readings from a range of disciplines, including anthropology, history, psychology, musicology, and cultural studies.

Taught by: Ristvet

One-term course offered either term

Activity: Seminar

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 110 Water in the Middle East Throughout History

Water scarcity is one of most important problems facing much of the Middle East and North Africa today. These are arid regions, but human and natural systems have interacted to determine relative water scarcity and abundance at different times and places. This course examines the distribution of water resources throughout the Middle East and the archaeology and anthropology of water exploitation and management over the last 9000 years, looking at continuities and changes through time. Students will learn to make basic digital maps representing Middle Eastern hydro-geography and arguments about modern and historic water resources in the region. The class will cooperatively play an "irrigation management game" designed to familiarize personnel involved in the operation of irrigation schemes with the logistical and social issues involved in water management. We will engage with a variety of media, including academic readings, popular journalism, films, satellite imagery, and digital maps, in our quest to explore whether or not the past can inform present efforts to better manage modern water resources. The course is structured in units focused on each of the major hydro-environmental zones of the Middle East: the river valleys of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Levant, the internal basins of western Central Asia and the Levant, the deserts of Arabia and North Africa, highland zones in Yemen and Iran, and coastal marsh areas along the Persian Gulf. We will examine irrigation systems, water supply systems, and ways of life surrounding water sources known from ethnographic studies, history, and archaeological excavations. These data will allow us to engage with debates in Middle Eastern anthropology, including those concerning the relationship between water and political power, the environment in which the world's earliest cities arose, and the relevance of "lessons of the past" for present and potential future water crises and "water wars." In our final weeks, we will discuss archaeology and historical anthropology's contribution to conceptions of water "sustainability" and examine attempts to revive traditional/ancient technologies and attitudes about water.

The cultures of Greece and Rome, what we call classical antiquity, span over a thousand years of multicultural achievement in the Mediterranean. This course tells the story of what it was like to live in the complex societies of ancient Greece and Rome. This story is told principally using the art, architecture, pottery and coins produced by these societies. We will examine both the bold and sexy, and the small and humble, from the Parthenon to wooden huts, from the Aphrodite of Knidos to the bones of a fisherman named Peter.

Does religion start with what's in our heads? Or are religious commitments made, shaped and strengthened by the people, places, and things around us? This course will explore how religion happens in the material world. We'll start with classical and contemporary theories on the relationship of religion to stuff. We'll then consider examples of how religion is animated not just by texts, but through interactions with objects, spaces, bodies, monuments, color, design, architecture, and film. We'll ask how these material expressions of religion move beyond private faith and connect religion to politics and identity.

We live in an interconnected world of ever-intensifying flows of people, goods, and ideas. Rather than giving rise to a "borderless world," however, these flows have instead led to the proliferation and elaboration of borders on a planetary scale. This introductory course explores this paradox, evaluating the links between migration and borders in different contexts across the globe. We ask a number of related questions: What is migration? What is a border? What is the relationship between migration and borders? How might anthropology - the study of what it means to be human - shed light on this relationship? In so doing, we explore a number of case studies from archaeological, biological, cultural, and linguistic perspectives to better understand migration and borders as conjoined anthropological phenomena.

Taught by: Carruthers

Course not offered every year

Activity: Lecture

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 116 Caribbean Culture and Politics

This course offers anthropological perspectives on the Caribbean as a geo-political and socio-cultural region, and on contemporary Caribbean diaspora cultures. We will examine how the region's long and diverse colonial history has structured relationships between race, ethnicity, class, gender and power, as well as how people have challenged these structures. As a region in which there have been massive transplantations of peoples and their cultures from Africa, Asia, and Europe, and upon which the United States has exerted considerable influence, we will question the processes by which the meeting and mixing of peoples and cultures has occurred. Course readings include material on the political economy of slavery and the plantation system, family and community life, religious beliefs and practices, gender roles and ideologies, popular culture, and the differing ways national, ethnic, and racial identities are expressed on the islands and throughout the Caribbean diaspora.

This course explores world witchcraft and possession from the persecutions of the early seventeenth century through the rise of Wicca in the twentieth century. The mere mention of these terms, or of such close cousins as demonology, sorcery, exorcism, magic, and the witches Sabbath, raises clear ethnographic and historical challenges. How can the analysis of witchcraft-- including beliefs, patterns of accusation, the general social position of victims, the intensity and timing of witch hunts, and its relation to religious practice, law, language, gender, social marginalization, and property--lead us to a more humane understanding of belief and action? Films such as The Exorcist, The Blair Witch Project, The Crucible, and Three Sovereigns for Sarah will focus discussion.

All across the continent, Africa is alive with the energies of young people, expressed in music, art, fashion, drama, video, poetry, protest, and urban legends. In this course, we take a close look at the wide variety of popular forms produced and consumed by young people in a diversity of contexts, urban and rural, elite and marginal, mainstream and transgressive. We will examine how popular culture draws from African tradition to craft innovative versions of modernity and futurity. We will explore themes of democracy, inequality, and social justice threaded through popular genres as well as experiences of joy, anger, fear, and hilarity. We will see how popular culture provides escape and entertainment for young people while also working to transform African societies.

The UN estimates that 2.9 of the world's 6.1 billion people live in cities and that this percentage is rapidly increasing in many parts of the world. This course examines urban life and urban problems by providing anthropological perspectives on this distinctive form of human association and land use. First we will examine the "origin" of cities, focusing on several of the places where cities first developed, including Mesopotamia and the Valley of Mexico. We will then investigate the internal structure of non-industrial cities by looking at case studies from around the world and from connections between the cities of the past and the city in which we live and work today.

Human evolutionary studies is a composite product of the fieldwork of both Paleolithic archaeology and human paleontology (or what we refer to as "stones and bones"). This marriage of two subdisciplines of anthropology produces a unique set of data that is intellectually managed and driven by theories within anthropology as a whole and even beyond -- to fields such as biology, psychology, and primate ethology, as we try to understand the origins of language, culture, and our unique physical characteristics. In this course, we will jointly discuss and debate the actual evidence of human evolution, describing what the actual evidence is and exploring how far can we take these interpretations.

For BA Students: Natural Science and Math Sector

One-term course offered either term

Activity: Lecture

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 123 Communication & Culture

The course looks at varieties of human expression -- such as art, film, language and song -- as communicative practices that connect persons together to form a common culture. Discussion is centered around particular case studies and ethnographic examples. Examination of communicative practices in terms of the types of expressive signs they employ, their capacity to formulate and transmit cultural beliefs and ideals (such as conceptions of politics, nature, and self), and to define the size and characteristics of groups and communities sharing such ideals. Discussion of the role of media, social institutions, and technologies of communication (print, electronic). Emphasis on contemporary communicative practices and the forms of culture that emerge in the modern world.

For BA Students: Society Sector

Taught by: Agha

One-term course offered either term

Activity: Recitation

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 124 Archaeology & The Bible

Archaeology and the Bible is a chronological survey of the long span of human occupation in the Land of the Bible, known by the names of the modern nation-states and political entities that occupy the area, as well as various short hands such as Levant and Syria-Palestine, from ca. 10,000 BCE, when humans first began to farm and herd animals through the time of the Divided Monarchy of Israel and Judah. While archaeology has moved beyond a primary concern with illuminating the Bible, NELC 155 will investigate the broader import of archaeological discoveries for our understanding of ancient Israel and its neighbors.

The material remains of the human past -objects and spaces- provide tangible evidence of past people's lives. Today's information technologies improve our ability to document, study, and present these materials. But what does it mean to deal with material evidence in a virtual context? In this class, students will learn basic digital methods for studying the past while working with objects, including those in the collections of the Penn Museum. This class will teach relational database design and 3D object modeling. As we learn about acquiring and managing data, we will gain valuable experience in the evaluation and use of digital tools. The digital humanities are a platform both for learning the basic digital literacy students need to succeed in today's world and for discussing the human consequences of these new technologies and data. We will discuss information technology's impact on the study and presentation of the past, including topics such as public participation in archaeological projects, educational technologies in museum galleries, and the issues raised by digitizing and disseminating historic texts and objects. Finally, we will touch on technology's role in the preservation of the past in today's turbulent world. No prior technical experience is required, but we hope students will share an enthusiasm for the past.

ANTH 134 Making the Natural World: An Introduction to Political Ecology

What are the limits of nature? When do natural systems become human or socio-natural systems? In this course, we examine the human construction of nature both conceptually, through ideas about environment, ecosystem, organism, and ecology; and materially, through trajectories of direct action in and on the landscape. Beginning with a consideration of foundational concepts in human ecology, we will discuss current problems and approaches, centering on political ecology. Readings and case studies are drawn from human-environmental contexts in Oceania, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, Europe, and North America. We will also consider topics including a) the relationship between indigenous and technocratic knowledge and resource governance, b) environmental movements themselves as objects of ethnographic study; c) justice and sustainability as environmental goals; d) inequality, displacement and violence as environmental problems; and e) fair trade and food security or sovereignty.

Taught by: Lycett

Course usually offered in fall term

Activity: Lecture

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 139 Ancient Civilizations of the World

This course explores the archaeology (material culture) of early complex societies or civilizations in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Aegean. According to the traditional paradigm, civilization first emerged during the fourth millennium BCE in Egypt and Mesopotamia. In the Mediterranean, state-level societies first appeared in Crete and mainland Greece in the early second millennium BCE. This course investigates how and why these civilizations developed, as well as their appearance and structure in the early historic (or literate) phases of their existence. A comparative perspective will illustrate what these early civilizations have in common and the ways in which they are unique. This course will consist largely of lectures which will outline classic archaeological and anthropological theories on state formation, before turning to examine the available archaeological (and textual) data on emerging complexity in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Aegean. This course does not presuppose any knowledge of archaeology or ancient languages; the instructor will provide any background necessary. Because this is a course on material culture, some of the class periods will be spent at the Penn Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. These will consist of a guided tour of a relevant gallery, as well as a hands-on object-based lab with archaeological materials selected by the instructor. This course meets the General Education Curriculums Cross Cultural Analysis f oundational approach, whose aim is to help students understand and interpret t he cultures of peoples (even long-dead peoples) with histories different from their own; it also fulfills the History and Tradition Sector breadth requirement.

The history of race and science has its American epicenter in Philadelphia. Throughout this Academically-Based Community Service (ABCS) course, we will interrogate the past and legacy of racial science in the United States; the broad themes we broach will be met concretely in direct engagement with Penn and the Philadelphia community. As an extended case study, students will undertake independent research projects using primary source documents from local archives, tracing the global history of hundreds of human skulls in the 19th century Samuel G. Morton cranial collection at the Penn Museum, a foundational and controversial anthropological collection in the scientific study of race. These projects will be formed through an ongoing partnership with a Philadelphia high school in which Penn students will collaborate with high school students on the research and design of a public-facing website on the Morton collection and the legacy of race and science in America. In our seminar, we will read foundational texts on the study of racial difference and discuss anti-racist responses and resistance to racial science from the 19th century to the present. Throughout, we will work directly with both primary and secondary sources, critically interrogating how both science and histories of science and its impacts on society are constructed. Throughout this course, we will explore interrelated questions about Penn and Philadelphia's outsize role in the history of racial science, about decolonization and ethics in scholarly and scientific practice, about the politics of knowledge and public-facing scholarship, and about enduring legacies of racial science and racial ideologies. All students are welcome and there are no prerequisites, save for intellectual curiosity and commitment to the course. This course will be of particular interest to those interested in race, American history and the history of science, anthropology, museum studies, education, and social justice.

This course will focus upon and examine the ethics of international heritage and the role that Museums play in the preservation of identity and cultural heritage. The mission of this course will be to inform and educate students about the role of Museums within the 21st century. What is the role and position of antiquities and important cultural objects in Museums? How should Museums acquire these objects and when should they be returned to countries and cultural groups? Examples from current issues will be included in the reading and discussions along with objects and issues within the Penn Museum.

Taught by: Leventhal

Course usually offered in fall term

Also Offered As: ARTH 141

Activity: Lecture

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 143 Explorations in Human Biology

This course is an exploration of human biology from a biocultural and evolutionary perspective. The class will provide you with a better understanding of what it means to be human, how humans came to exhibit such a wide range variation, and what biological anthropology can contribute to your understanding of the world. In this class students will learn to integrate the theory and methods used in human biology research through lectures, assignments, and lab sessions. This course will explore topics including human genetics, growth and development, nutrition, disease, and reproduction. We will also use the course as an opportunity to introduce you to the important contributions of biological anthropologists to the study of race, inequality, sex and gender, and health among others.

For BA Students: Natural Science and Math Sector

Taught by: Schurr

Course usually offered in spring term

Activity: Lecture

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 148 Food and Fire: Archaeology in the Laboratory

This course will let students explore the essential heritage of human technology through archaeology. People have been transforming their environment from the first use of fire for cooking. Since then, humans have adapted to the world they created using the resources around them. We use artifacts to understand how the archaeological record can be used to trace breakthroughs such as breaking stone and bone, baking bread, weaving cloth and firing pottery and metals. The seminar will meet in the Penn Museum's Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Materials. Students will become familiar with the Museum's collections and the scientific methods used to study different materials. Class sessions will include discussions, guest presentations, museum field trips, and hands-on experience in the laboratory.

This course offers a broad introduction to evolving scholarship in the combined fields of Native American Studies and Indigenous Studies worldwide. Students will examine the various ways that Indigenous peoples and academic researchers are currently engaging with Indigenous knowledges, while also exploring the lingering impacts of settler colonialism and the influence of decolonizing methodologies. Students will gain foundational understandings of the cross-disciplinary nature of Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS), by studying theoretical interpretations of Indigenous peoples in academic and historical contexts, and by examining practical approaches to Indigenous research in diverse worldwide settings. Students will approach topics from a variety of disciplinary traditions, utilizing historical texts, ethnological studies, oral literature, material culture, and modern media, including websites and databases produced by and for Indigenous communities. Readings will include the work of researchers who bridge the disciplines of anthropology, history, folklore, art, law, science, etc. Students will watch a selection of films by Indigenous filmmakers, and attend lectures by a selection of Indigenous guest speakers. NAIS faculty advisors from various schools at Penn (e.g., School of Arts and Sciences, Education, Law, Nursing) will also present several guest lectures to highlight their unique experiences and research projects with Indigenous communities. Special case studies will focus on: new directions in collaborative research; issues in museum representation and repatriation; heritage site protection and Indigenous archaeology; legal interventions and protections for Indigenous rights; and innovative projects in language restoration and cultural recovery.

Taught by: Bruchac

One-term course offered either term

Activity: Seminar

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 151 Archaeology of American History: The Colonial Period

Anthropology 151/752 is a lecture-seminar that is open to all students. This course will explore American history through a different range of information. Over the last seventy five years the new field of Historical Archaeology (academically first developed at Penn) has excavated numerous sites dating from the 16th, the 17th, and the 18th centuries in what is now the United States. Recovered archaeological remains combined with archival sources are giving us a different view of the rise of America as a distinctive society. This class is focused on the Colonial Period from the earliest explorations by Europeans to the eve of the American Revolution. Discoveries of early European intrusions into the continent, especially the Spanish and English, will be reviewed along with the reaction of Native Peoples to such contact. Successful settlements on the East Coast in La Florida and at Jamestown as well as in the Rio Grande Valley in the Southwest will be explored along with later colonization of the Middle Atlantic and New England regions. Mature 18th century colonial society as seen in Philadelphia and Annapolis along with the distinctive subject of African American sites will also be covered.

Climate change transforms the natural and built environments, and it is re-shaping how we understand, make sense, and care for our past. Climate changes history. This course explores the Anthropocene, the age when humans are remaking earth's systems, from an on-water perspective. In on-line dialogue and video conferences with research teams in port cities on four continents, this undergraduate course focuses on Philadelphia as one case study of how rising waters are transfiguring urban history, as well as its present and future. Students projects take them into the archives at the Independence Seaport Museum and at Bartram's Garden. Field trips by boat on the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers and on land to the Port of Philadelphia and to the John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge invite transhistorical dialogues about how colonial and then industrial-era energy and port infrastructure transformed the region's vast tidal marshlands wetlands. Excursions also help document how extreme rain events, storms, and rising waters are re-making the built environment, redrawing lines that had demarcated land from water. In dialogue with one another and invited guest artists, writers, and landscape architects, students final projects consider how our waters might themselves be read and investigated as archives. What do rising seas subsume and hold? Whose stories do they tell? What floats to the surface?

Class sessions will be devoted to discussion of the dynamics of globalization with the objective of illuminating the world-historical context of the changes that are happening around us unevenly in different parts of the world today, and developing critical approaches to the available research methodologies and explanatory theories. Weekly readings will be selected from the major researchers in the field, and students will test their ideas in short research projects of their own on questions arising from the discussions. The overall approach will be historical and comparative. Apart from weekly assigned readings and participation in class discussions, requirements for the course include three short research papers.

Taught by: Spooner

Course not offered every year

Activity: Seminar

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 159 Population and Public Health in Eastern Europe

Since the collapse of communism in 1989 in Eastern Europe (and 1991 in the Soviet Union), many of the countries in the region have experienced public health crises and demographic catastrophe. Below replacement fertility rates and massive out migration have decimated the populations of these countries even as populations age and place unsustainable strains on pension systems and medical services. The demographic collapse has also been accompanied by falling male life expectancy and the rise of alcoholism, depression, domestic violence, and suicide. The economic exigencies of the transition from communism to capitalism dismantled welfare states at the exact moment when health services were most needed, leaving charities and nongovernmental organization to try to fill in the gaps. Through a combination of readings from the fields of epidemiology, demography, and medical anthropology, this course examines the public health implications of poverty and social dislocation in post-communist states. All readings and assignments are in English.

This seminar examines classic and current scholarship and literature on gender and sexuality in contemporary Eastern Europe, and examines the dialogue and interchange of ideas between East and West. Although the scholarly and creative works will primarily investigate the changing status of women during the last three decades, the course will also look at changing constructions of masculinity and LGBT movements and communities in the former communist bloc. Topics will include: the woman question before 1989; gender and emerging nationalisms; visual representations in television and film; social movements; work; romance and intimacy; spirituality; and investigations into the constructed concepts of "freedom" and "human rights."

ANTH 169 Merchants, Saints, Slaves and Sojourners: the Worlds of the Indian Ocean

Do oceans serve to divide and demarcate distinct cultures and regions? Or do they facilitate exchange, connection and cosmopolitanism? This course will explore the manner in which the Indian Ocean has played both roles throughout history, and how the nature of those divisions and connections has changed over time from the ancient to the modern world. We will reconstruct the intertwined mercantile, religious and kinship networks that spanned the Indian Ocean world, across the Middle East, East Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia and China, illuminating the histories of Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam, while also considering the role of successive imperial political formations, from Rome to Britain. Throughout the semester we will seek to understand the Indian Ocean through the people who lived and worked in its milieu - from consuls and military commanders, to traders, brokers, sailors, prisoners and slaves. Course materials will draw on a variety of disciplines (anthropology, archaeology, material culture, religious studies) to construct the cultural, economic, and environmental history of the Indian Ocean.

ANTH 177 Colonial Pasts and Indigenous Futures: A History of Belize and Central America

The small country of Belize (formerly British Honduras) represents the past history and ongoing story of Central America and the region. Belize has a colonial past and present with strong ties to the UK and emerging connections to the US. At the same time, there is a growing post-colonial debate within the country about the role of indigenous Maya people in the past, present and future of the country. This course will be the first of two courses which will lead to active work in Belize during the summer of 2021 with the development and creation of a Community Museum within the Maya village of Indian Creek in southern Belize. This course will be taught by Richard M. Leventhal who has worked in Belize for the past 20 years. Leventhal will be joined by 3 Maya activists from Belize who will co-teach the class for 5-6 weeks out of the semester.

ANTH 180 From Ayahuasca to Zoloft: Anthropological Approaches to Drugs and Drug Use

In this course we will consider the cultural, social, political, medical, and biological aspects of drugs (legal, illegal, pharmaceutical, botanical, and otherwise) through space and time. We will take a broad approach, thinking critically about what, who, and under what circumstances a given substance becomes a "drug." In doing so, we will be able to interrogate the linguistic dimensions of drugs, considering the way in which language creates social worlds and social meanings. We will explore different kinds of drugs, their origins, biochemical properties, and the biological pathways through which they affect us. We will also think about how drugs and drug use has changed over time, taking a cross-cultural and materialist perspective to investigate drug use past and present. Topics we will address include debates over the commercialization, criminalization, and decriminalization of hallucinogenic plants such as marijuana, the recent use of drugs ranging from LSD to magic mushrooms to treat depression and other mental illnesses, the legacies of colonialism and botanical migrations, the ethics of the pharmaceutical industry, and comparative explorations of the language about and approaches to addressing both the "crack epidemic" of the early 80s and 90s and the current opioid crisis. We will read both classic anthropological texts including ethnographies as well as works from other disciplines including science studies, biology, history, ethnobotany, and sociology.

This course provides an introduction to the study of Africa in all its diversity and complexity. Our focus is cultural, geographical, and historical: we will seek to understand Africa's current place in the world political and economic order and learn about the various social and physical factors that have influenced the historical trajectory of the continent. We study the cultural formations and empires that emerged in Africa before European colonial invasion and then how colonialism reshaped those sociocultural forms. We'll learn about the unique kinds of kinship and religion in precolonial Africa and the changes brought about by the spread of Islam and Christianity. Finally, we'll take a close look at contemporary issues such as ethnic violence, migration, popular culture and poverty, and we'll debate the various approaches to understanding those issues.

A study under faculty supervision of a problem area or topic not included in the formal curriculum.

One-term course offered either term

Prerequisites: Junior or senior standing and written permission of instructor and undergraduate chair

Activity: Independent Study

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 202 Language, Migration, Diaspora

Centering on the relation between language, migration, and diaspora, this course uses linguistic anthropological approaches to understand how the 'very big' is reflected in the 'very small.' We will approach language use as a process that unfolds in the microclimate of everyday interaction, but whose effects extend to and shape large-scale social processes. We will ask a number of interrelated questions: How does language use shape global phenomena like transnationalism and diasporic populations? How do globalizing forces impact and shape language structure and use? How are mobility and (im)migration enabled or constrained through everyday communicative interaction? We begin by exploring the ideologies inherent in everyday speech, evaluating how language is linked to social identities like class, race, gender, and sexuality, and to social personae like 'the migrant,' 'the refugee,' 'the foreigner,' or to the 'diasporic subject' more generally. We then explore the cultural politics of languages in and across nation-states, attending to their uses and values in unprecedented global flows of information, goods, and people.

Taught by: Carruthers

Course not offered every year

Activity: Lecture

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 205 American Folklore

This course will examine American expressive culture, including everyday speech, narrative, music, foodways, religion, public celebrations, and material culture through an exploration of the multiple and changing avenues of diversity in the United States. Folklore can be considered the unofficial culture that exists beneath and between the institutions of power that we read about in our history books, and that is what we will be studying--the 99% of American life that goes unseen and unnoticed in other college courses. Some of the topics we will examine are: campus folklore; body art and adornment; contemporary (urban) legends and beliefs; public celebrations and rituals; and the adaptation and commodification of folk culture in popular media.

ANTH 209 Indigenous Communities and Community Museums: Directions for the Future

Community museums are becoming more commonplace within indigenous communities throughout the Americas. These museums are created internally, by and for communities, as a way of framing self-identity and representation. The development of these museums is focused upon the need to define and highlight identity and differences between indigenous communities and the surrounding world. These community museums contrast dramatically with other cultural museums where the stories and histories of groups tend to be controlled by the nation-state and professional curators. This course will focus on the nature of indigenous communities, cultural representation, and identity with a focus upon the modern Maya communities of southern Belize. In addition, museums and community museums, world-wide, will be examined and analyzed. What are the different models of community museums and what is the process for the development of such museums? Is the only de-colonized museum one created and framed within and by the community? Seminar format with weekly discussions, readings, and a final research paper. There are no pre-requisites for this course and a background in anthropology is not required. This course will be connected to a community museum project in Indian Creek, Belize where travel and work will be initiated over the summer of 2021. This course is recommended but not required for participation in summer research program in Belize

This course will cover the topic of DEATH from a bio/cultural perspective including the evolution of life history (aging and demography - mortality) as well as from an archaeological perspective (prehistory) and early history of mortuary practices. Nothing in the lifespan of humans is so revealing on the interface of culture and biology as is death and the experience of death. This course is not concerned specifically with how an individual experiences death, but in the ways that culture and biology have come to define and deal with physical death and the death experience.

Taught by: Monge

Course not offered every year

Activity: Lecture

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 211 Religion and Ecology

This class will introduce the overlaps between religion and ecology. Rather than assuming that there is a necessary positive or negative relationship between religion and ecology, we will look at how these relationships have materialized in complicated ways at different moments in history. We'll consider perspectives and case studies from a range of different moments in history. We'll consider perspectives and case studies from a range of different traditions, with a special attention paid to the genesis of the field of Religion and Ecology in critiques of Christian attitudes toward the environment in the 1960s and 1970s.

Religion is full of animals--lions and lambs, monkeys and elephants, buffalo and snakes, even mythical beasts. The identity of the human being is explained, in many traditions, by contrast with the identity of other species. We know who we are because we know who they are, or do we? This course interrogates--through an exploration of sacred texts, art, film, and museum artifacts--the tension present in many traditions between an anthropocentric prioritization of the human being and religious resources that encourage a valuing of other animal species. We'll explore the way animals function both as religious objects and as religious subjects across diverse traditions, asking how human-animal relationships have shaped religion and how religion has shaped the way we think about and interact with other animals. We'll ask how religion has engaged with animals over time and across global cultures, understanding them as symbols, messengers, and manifestations of the divine; as material for ritual and sacrifice; as kin and subordinates; as food and as filth; as helpmeets and as tempters. How have these perspectives shaped animal ethics, influencing the treatment, use, and consumption of animals and their bodies? Finally, we'll ask what it means that we ourselves are evolved animals. How does our own animality factor into the practice of human religion? Is our religious capacity part of what sets us apart from other animals or is religiosity a trait we might expect to find in other species? To what extent is religion a function of the animal?

First-hand participation in research project in historical archaeology in Southern New Jersey. Transportation provided by the university. Students will assist in excavations and archival research on local archaeological sites. Class is open to all undergraduates, no previous archaeological experience is required. Attendance will involve Fridays or Saturdays, all day from 8:00 to 5:00 including travel time to the excavations and back to the University Museum. Students enroll for only one day (F or S). Enrollment is limited so specific permission of the instructor is required (Robert L. Schuyler: schuyler@sas.upenn.edu; (215)898-6965; U Museum 412). A follow up laboratory course (Anth 220 in the spring semester) will also be available during which the artifacts and documentary sources collected in the fall will be analyzed at the University Museum. Course may be repeated for credit.

Follow-up for ANTH 219. Students may enroll in either or both courses, and in any sequence; however, preference will be given to those previously enrolled in ANTH 219 that Fall. Class will meet in three hour sections on Fridays or Saturdays and will involve the analysis of artifacts, documentary records, oral historic sources and period illustrations collected on Southern New Jersey historic sites that Fall. No previous archaeological or lab experience is required. (Robert L. Schuyler: schuyler@sas.upenn.edu; (215) 898-6965; UMuseum 412). Course may be repeated for credit.

By focusing on the scientific analysis of inorganic archaeological materials, this course will explore processes of creation in the past. ANTH 221/521 will take place in the Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Materials (CAAM) and will be team taught in three modules: analysis of lithics, analysis of ceramics and analysis of metals. Each module will combine laboratory and classroom exercises to give students hands-on experience with archaeological materials. We will examine how the transformation of materials into objects provides key information about past human behaviors and the socio-economic contexts of production, distribution, exchange and use. Discussion topics will include invention and adoption of new technologies, change and innovation, use of fire, and craft specialization.

This course will investigate and discuss the various techniques of analysis that biological anthropologists can apply to forensic cases. Topics include human osteology, the recovery of bodies, the analysis of life history, the reconstruction of causes of death, and various case studies where anthropologists have contributed significantly to solving forensic cases. Discussions will include the limitations of forensic anthropology and the application of DNA recovery to skeletal/mummified materials.

The course circulates around ships and boats. The course combines methods from environmental humanities, visual arts and history to consider multi-modal practices of black freedom and escape. From free black sailors in the eighteenth century Caribbean Sea, to twentieth and twenty-first century West African fishing boats, notions of Haitian "boat people," Parliament Funkadelic's mothership, and sinking boats with Somali and Ethiopian migrants off Yemen's coast, ships have been and remain technologies of containment and freedom for communities of African descent. In the face of environmental vulnerabilities and the reality of water ways as systems of sustenance and imminent death, this course asks: how do black people use the ship and the process and practice of shipping as vessels for freedom, escape, and as a site to experiment with futures? Using the city of Philadelphia and the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers as our primary site of interrogation, the course attends to the threats that black people experience following natural disaster (New Orleans, Haiti, Puerto Rico) and everyday engagement with the local and global state structures regarding water (Flint, MI). In this context, we also look to shipping as a site to theorize and account for black innovation, meanings of (non-)sovereignty, and alternative futures.

Iraq: Ancient Cities and Empires is a chronological survey of the ancient civilization that existed in the drainage basin of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers from the early settled village farming communities of the 7th millennium BCE to the middle of the 1st millennium BCE, when Nebuchadnezzar II ruled Babylon and much of the Middle East. Though organized period by period, NELC 241 explores various social, political, economic, and ideological topics, exposing students to various strands of evidence, including settlement survey data, excavated architectural remains, artifacts, and documentary sources, as well as an eclectic mix of theoretical perspectives. The course aims to provide students with a strong foundation for the further study of the ancient and pre-modern Middle East.

Introduction to Medical Anthropology takes central concepts in anthropology -- culture, adaptation, human variation, belief, political economy, the body -- and applies them to human health and illness. Students explore key elements of healing systems including healing technologies and healer-patient relationships. Modern day applications for medical anthropology are stressed.

This seminar concentrates on the ways that various peoples in the world make their history by means other than relying on written texts alone. Over the course of the semester, we therefore may be examining such different public events and civic rituals as parades, political and religious processions, local historical pageants, carnivals, historic preservation, museums, military reenactments, and history theme parks. The emphasis in each of these forms, places, and semiotic processes will be on their identity and function as key performances that transform consciousness, shift individuals alternately into both actors and spectators, reframe the everyday as the metaphysical, and intensify the status of cultural values in the histories they present to view. Course requirements: a seminar paper, the topic of which you will discuss with me no later than week five of the course; and a working annotated bibliography and statement of your paper's main thesis. I will say more about these assignments as they approach.

What role does music play in articulating religious identities and spaces? What is the importance of ritual musics as they persist and change in the modern world? How does music reflect and articulate religious ways of thinking and acting? In this course, we explore these and other questions about the interrelations between music, religion, and ritual in South and Southeast Asia. Focusing on India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Indonesia, the course emphasizes musics from Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim and Christian traditions; nevertheless, it draws widely to touch upon sacred musics in Pakistan, Nepal, Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, and among some indigenous peoples in the region. Throughout, we explore ontologies of sound; sonic occurrences in religious structures, public processions, and pilgrimage sites; the construction of religion and ritual as ideas forged through colonial encounter and modern scholarship on religion; the politics of sacred sounds in today's public spaces and contemporary media, such as television and online; and the surprising fluidity between popular and sacred musical genres.

This course will explore the role played by disease in human evolution, from the emergence of the human lineage to the present day. We will evaluate both infectious and non-infectious diseases and examine the way in which populations and disease organisms have co-evolved. Related issues to be explored include the nature of the virulence and pathogenicity of infectious agents, and the impact of vaccination on pathogen evolution. In addition, we will discuss the epidemiological transition and the rise of complex diseases of modernization (e.g., diabetes, cancer) that has occurred in the past several centuries. Overall, the course will provide a broader understanding of the influence of disease processes on the evolution of the human species.

Taught by: Schurr

Course not offered every year

Activity: Lecture

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 245 Environment in India: Nature, Culture, & Conservation in the Western Ghats

India, one of the world's most populous countries, also ranks as one of the most important centers of biodiversity, conservation, and environmental movements. Despite pervasive scholarly and popular narratives of inevitable ecological damage associated with population growth, human land use has, at times, enhanced biodiversity, preserved existing environments, and created new ones. In this course, students will examine long-term human and natural histories from a number of perspectives to develop more accurate, historically-informed understandings of how India's natural spaces have developed and how the spaces can be best sustained. them. During the travel component, students will visit India and work with local partners who are actively engaged in protecting human livelihoods, reducing human-wildlife conflict, and conserving biodiversity in the Western Ghat Mountains, a biodiversity hotspot.

Taught by: Morrison

Course not offered every year

Activity: Seminar

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 246 Molecular Anthropology

In this course, we will explore the molecular revolution in biological anthropology. In particular, we will examine how molecular data can be used to illuminate anthropological question concerning human origins, evolution and biological variation. Some of the specific topics to be covered in this course are the phylogenetic relationships among primates, kinship in apes and monkeys, the hominoid trichotomy, modern human origins and migrations, Neanderthal and Denisovan admixture with modern humans, biogenetics of skin color, and physiological, phenotypic and disease adaptations.

Food satisfies human needs on many levels. ANTH 248 explores the importance of food in human experience, starting with the nutritional and ecological aspects of food choice and going on to focus on the social and ritual significance of foods and feasts. Particular attention will be paid to the way that archaeologists and biological anthropologists find out about food use in the past. Contemporary observations about the central significance of eating as a social activity will be linked to the development of cuisines, economies, and civilizations in ancient times. The course will use lectures, discussions, films, food tastings, and fieldwork to explore the course themes.

Taught by: Moore

Course not offered every year

Activity: Lecture

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 249 Evolutionary Medicine

Evolutionary medicine is the application of modern evolutionary theory to studies of health and disease in humans. In taking this approach, the course will explore the role that disease played in human evolution. We will examine both infectious and non-infectious diseases, and assess the way in which populations and disease organisms have co-evolved. Related issues to be examined are the nature of the virulence and pathogenicity of infectious agents, and their efforts to subvert the immune system's responses to infection. We will also explore the evolved responses that enable individuals to protect, heal and recuperate themselves from infections and injuries, such as fever and sickness behavior, and the fitness enhancing aspects of these processes. Finally, we will study how past adaptations of early humans to their environments now affects modern humans, who have very different diets, life expectancy, activity patterns, and hygiene than their ancestors.

This seminar examines how the adjective "religious" has been used to modify the nouns "violence", "tolerance", and "freedom". It traces the historical development of liberal ideas of tolerance and human rights, interrogates the common assumption that religion exerts a perverse influence on politics and vice versa, critically examines the concept of terrorism, and connects the neoliberal ideal of unfettered free markets to the idea of being "spiritual but not religious." Previous courses in RELS or ANTH recommended.

The Inca created a vast and powerful South American empire in the high Andes Mountains that was finally conquered by Spain. Using Penn's impressive museum collections and other archaeological, linguistic, and historical sources, this course will examine Inca religion and worldview, architecture, sacred temples, the capital of Cuzco, ritual calendar, ceque system, textiles, metalworking, economic policies and expansionist politics from the dual perspectives of Inca rulers and their subjects. Our task is to explain the rise, dominance, and fall of the Incas as a major South American civilization.

This freshman-friendly course provides a broad introductory overview of modern Southeast Asia, surveying the region's extraordinary diversity and ongoing social, economic, and political transformations. Centering on the nation-states that have emerged following the second World War, we will assess elements of Southeast Asian geography, history, language and literature, cosmologies, kinship systems, music, art and architecture, agriculture, industrialization and urbanization, politics, and economic change. We will remain particularly attentive to the ways Southeast Asians negotiate and contend with ongoing challenges with modernization, development, and globalization.

This course considers Caribbean musics within a broad and historical framework.Caribbean musical practices are explored by illustrating the many ways that aesthetics, ritual, communication, religion, and social structure are embodied in and contested through performance. These initial inquiries open onto an investigation of a range of theoretical concepts that become particularly pertinent in Caribbean contexts--concepts such as post-colonialism, migration, ethnicity, hybridity, syncretism, and globalization. Each of these concepts, moreover, will be explored with a view toward understanding its connections to the central analytical paradigm of the course--diaspora. Throughout the course, we will listen to many different styles and repertories of music ranging from calpso to junkanoo, from rumba to merengue, and from dance hall to zouk. We will then work to understand them not only in relation to the readings that frame our discussions but also in relation to our own North-American contexts of music consumption and production. (Formerly Music 258).

Most people's information about the Past is drawn from coffee table picture books, popular movies, video games, documentaries about discoveries of "ancient, mysterious, and lost" civilizations, and tours often lead by guides of limited or even dubious credentials. How are these ideas presented, formed, and circulated? Who creates and selects the information presented in this diverse media? Are these presentations accurate? Do they promote or hurt scientific explanations? Can the artistic, aesthetic, and scientific realms be bridged to effectively promote and interpret the past? How can modern technologies be applied to do a better job at presenting what is difficult to experience firsthand? This class will focus on case studies, c and methods of how archaeology and the past are created, presented and used in movies, museums, games, the internet, and art. Each year, the studio-seminar focuses on a project. In addition to exploring general concepts of archaeology and the media, students will work in teams to produce an interactive, digital media exhibit using the latest modeling visualization programs for presenting the sacred landscape of the Inca capitalof Cuzco, Peru. Cuzco is one of the most important UNESCO World Heritage sites and visited by nearly a million tourists a year. Potential class projectinclude fly-throughs of architectural and landscape renderings, simulations of astronomy and cosmology, modeling of human behavior within architectural and landscape settings, and study artifacts in the Penn Museum.

Science and technology figure centrally in the economic, political, and socio-cultural changes that impact our worlds. Happenings in the life sciences, including the discovery of new genes, pathways, and processes, are redrawing concepts of the body and human nature and refiguring social and political relations. The seminar starts from the premise that scientific facts are made, not things existing a priori in the world and that are merely picked up by researchers and consumed by lay audiences. Likewise, technologies are created through a process of intense negotiation between producers and their sophisticated users. Focusing on the biosciences, we explore the production of science and technology and how they 1)affect individuals, self-identities, subjectivity, kinship, and social relationships; 2)have interacted with or reinforced political programs, racial classifications, unequal access to knowledge, and patterns of social injustice; 3)inform contemporary institutional structures, strategies of governance, and practices of citizenship. We will combine methods and perspectives from social and cultural anthropology, and the social studies of science and technology, and will draw from historical case studies, contemporary ethnographies of science, scientific and medical journals, documentary films and media reports.

Taught by: Petryna

Course not offered every year

Activity: Seminar

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 263 Music and Performance of Africa

This class provides an overview of the most popular musical styles and discussion of the cultural and political contexts in which they emerged in contemporary Africa. Learning to perform a limited range of African music/dance will be part of this course. No prior performance experience required.

By focusing on the scientific analysis of archaeological remains, this course will explore life and death in the past. It takes place in the Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Materials (CAAM) and is team taught in three modules: human skeletal analysis, analysis of animal remains, and analysis of plant remains. Each module will combine laboratory and classroom exercises to give students hands-on experience with archaeological materials. We will examine how organic materials provide key information about past environments, human behavior, and cultural change through discussions of topics such as health and disease, inequality, and food.

This course examines museums as sites where issues of Indigenous identity, memory, place and power intersect. Museums have long been engaged in the selective preservation, representation, and contextualization of Indigenous objects, cultures, and histories. We will examine antiquarian impulses that inspired the collecting of curiosities, scientific studies that drove the collection of biological specimens, and nationalist ideals that shaped monuments to house imperialist memories. Museums are now sites for complex, often contentious discourse around Indigenous collections. Students will review histories of local and national collecting processes, with a particular focus on Native American collections and concerns. We will also consider how Indigenous curators and new kinds of museums have developed innovative displays and interpretations.

Taught by: Bruchac

Activity: Seminar

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 271 Ancient Mexico and Central America

This course will provide an overview of the diverse cultures of ancient Mesoamerica. Across the landscape that is now Mexico and Central America, the societies that inhabited highlands and tropical lowlands developed agricultural lands, built towering pyramids and cities, and forged great civilizations all before the arrival of Europeans to the New World. In this this course, students will learn about these diverse civilizations and the many similarities and continuities among them. They will also learn about the legacy left by these cultures on today's modern peoples of Central Mexico and Central America.

Course not offered every year

Activity: Lecture

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 273 Global Health: Anthropological Perspectives

In some parts of the world spending on pharmaceuticals is astronomical. In others, people struggle for survival amid new and reemerging epidemics and have little or no access to basic or life-saving therapies. Treatments for infectious diseases that disproportionately affect the world's poor remain under-researched and global health disparities are increasing. This interdisciplinary seminar integrates perspectives from the social sciences and the biomedical sciences to explore 1) the development and global flows of medical technologies; 2) how the health of individuals and groups is affected by medical technologies, public policy, and the forces of globalization as each of these impacts local worlds. The seminar is structured to allow us to examine specific case material from around the world (Haiti, South Africa, Brazil, Russia, China, India, for example), and to address the ways in which social, political-economic, and technological factors -- which are increasingly global in nature -- influence basic biological mechanisms and disease outcomes and distribution. As we analyze each case and gain familiarity with ethnographic methods, we will ask how more effective interventions can be formulated. The course draws from historical and ethnographic accounts, medical journals, ethical analyses, and films, and familiarizes students with critical debates on globalization and with local responses to globalizing processes.

Rooted in the rubric of public interest social science, the course focuses on bridging theory and practice motivated by a commitment to social justice through original ethnographic research. In particular, this course will focus on kinesiology and the anthropology of sports and well-being through intense analysis of the Young Quakers Community Athletics (YQCA) program, a collaboration between the Netter Center for Community Partnerships and Penn Athletics. In guest lecturers from multiple disciplines will help to round out the course. The core learning objective is to bring a broad range of specialized expertise to foster a holistic examination of a complex institutional partnership intended to promote positive social transformation and improved human health and well-being.

Taught by: Frank Johnston, Gretchen Suess

Activity: Seminar

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 294 Global Cities: Urbanization in the Global South

This course examines the futures of urbanization in most of the world. With cities in "developing" countries set to absorb 95% of urban population growth in the next generation, the course explores the plans, spaces and social experiences of this dramatic urban century. How do proliferating urban populations sustain themselves in the cities of Latin America, Africa and Asia? What kinds of social and political claims do these populations make more just and sustainable cities? The course investigates the ongoing experiences in urban planning, infrastructure development and environmental governance in cities of the Global South. In so doing, it imagines new forms of citizenship, development and sustainability that are currently unfolding in these cities of the future.

ANTH 300 is a Research Seminar for anthropology majors. It defines the Penn anthropology major by bringing together and inter-relating major threads from the different subfields of the Penn anthropology curriculum. Each session includes contributions from members of the standing faculty and seminar discussions of a research theme in which anthropological knowledge is currently progressing.

Course usually offered in fall term

Activity: Seminar

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 301 Senior Thesis

Individual research under faculty supervision culminating in a thesis.

One-term course offered either term

Activity: Independent Study

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 303 Research Methods in Cultural Anthropology

This undergraduate seminar is about how ethnographers do research. It introduces fundamental concepts and techniques - research design, participant observation, interviews, questionnaires, field notes, archives, data collection and analysis. It also addresses ethical and legal issues- cultural protocols, intellectual property rights, collaborative anthropology, and institutional review boards. Students will conduct original ethnographic research in partnership with the Netter Center.

Course not offered every year

Activity: Seminar

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 305 Anthropology and Policy: History, Theory, Practice

From the inception of the discipline, anthropologists have applied their ethnographic and theoretical knowledge to policy issues concerning the alleviation of practical human problems. This approach has not only benefited peoples in need but it has also enriched the discipline, providing anthropologists with the opportunity to develop new theories and methodologies from a problem-centered approach. The class will examine the connection between anthropology and policy, theory and practice (or 'praxis'), research and application. We will study these connections by reading about historical and current projects. As an ABCS course, students will also volunteer in a volunteer organization of their choice in the Philadelphia area, conduct anthropological research on the organization, and suggest ways that the anthropological approach might support the efforts of the organization.

Course not offered every year

Also Offered As: ANTH 609

Activity: Seminar

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 307 Contemporary Native Americans

This course examines the social and political lives of contemporary Native American Indians in the United States and Canada. Topics include: Indigenous identity; homelands and natural resources; popular culture and media; Indigenous arts and cultural expression; museum representations; athletics; gender relations; tribal recognition and sovereignty; and resistance movements. We will consider the origins of federal programs and legislation that have become essential to the protection of Native American freedoms. Students can expect to gain an appreciation of the complexity and cultural diversity of Native communities and tribal nations and insights into their interactions with other cultures over time.

Ethnohistory is a multi-disciplinary form of ethnographic study and documentary research that employs both anthropological and historical approaches. This course examines the foundations of the ethnohistorical method as a means to interpret cross-cultural colonial interactions and conflicts, and to better understand the complex histories of Native American Indian peoples from Pennsylvania and northward and eastward. Students will develop skills and strategies for interpreting and contextualizing primary and secondary source materials, oral traditions, colonial records, historical maps, and material culture. Hands-on study will include visits to local archives and historical sites to view relevant documents and landscapes.

Taught by: Bruchac

Course not offered every year

Activity: Seminar

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 309 Psychoanalysis and Anthropology

This course will introduce students to the rich literature that has grown up around the encounter between psychoanalysis and anthropology, from totem and taboo, to studies of the Oedipus complex, child-rearing practices, ritual symbolism, mythology, and dreams. The class will also look to the future, endeavoring to examine as well such issues as the role of computers (are they self objects?) and the internet (including such online games as "Second Life"), dreams in space alien abduction narratives, sexuality in advertising, political psychology, and other contemporary issues. This course counts towards towards the Psychoanalytic Studies (PSYS) Minor.

Emergent transdisciplinary fields, such as the environmental humanities, reflect a growing awareness that responses to contemporary environmental dilemmas require the collaborative work of not only diverse scientists, medical practitioners, and engineers, but also more expansive publics, including artists, urban and rural communities, social scientists, and legal fields. This course is inspired by the need to attend to environmental challenges, and their health, justice, and knowledge production implications, as inherently social concerns. The class is co-taught by faculty from the School of Arts and Sciences and the School of Medicine, and will address the challenges and possibilities of working across disciplinary boundaries, building collaborative affinities, and negotiating frictions between diverse methodologies and epistemological approaches. Dr. Kristina Lyons from the Department of Anthropology brings years of experience collaborating with soil scientists, small farmers, indigenous communities, lawyers, and judges in Colombia on watershed restoration projects, soil degradation, toxicity, and the implementation of socio-ecological justice. Dr. Marilyn Howarth is a medical doctor from the Center of Excellence in Environmental Toxicology of the School of Medicine and has experience engaging the public, legislators and regulators around environmental health issues affecting the quality of air, water, soil and consumer products. Through their different lenses, they will foster interdisciplinary environmental collaboration and scholarship by engaging students in discussions and research that bring together the arts and sciences regarding issues of urban air pollution, soil remediation, deforestation, and water contamination, among other environmental health problems. This inaugural course seeks to explore environmental humanities on the global scale. Using Dr. Lyons' deep insight and valuable connections to communities in Colombia, we will explore the experience of environmental degradation, opportunities and challenges for mitigation, and socio-environmental health implications there while placing these issues in conversation with U.S. public health, regulatory and political frameworks and community experiences on similar issues. A comparative exploration of environmental justice in both Colombia and the U.S. will be infused into much of the discussion. This class offers a unique opportunity for students from engineering, natural and social sciences, humanities and the arts to learn to converse and collaborate around pressing socio-environmental and public health issues.

An individual's life course is often reflected, enhanced, and defined by their relations to other individuals. This course will investigate the concept of kinship in the Roman world through textual, visual, and archaeological evidence. We will explore relationships at all levels of society from the imperial family to the slaves and freedmen who were part of larger households, in order to understand how different relationships shaped and structured interactions in Roman society. Together, we will explore the following questions: how were relationships and bonds represented in the ancient world? What structures were in place for families to perpetuate themselves through biological or adoptive means? How could non-Roman citizens create family connections through formal and informal channels? How could relationships be celebrated in life and commemorated in death? We will use written evidence from ancient historians, visual evidence like the Altar of Peace, and archaeological evidence from cemeteries to examine how Roman notions of kinship shaped life and death in different social milieu.

What is nature? What is culture? What kinds of practices and actors constitute what we call science? Who and what constitute the sphere we refer to as politics? A number of theoretical developments in cultural anthropology, political theory, critical geography, and feminist science studies have problematized the modernist ontological divide between Nature and Culture and a whole series of binary oppositions (such as objects/subjects, matter/form, bio/geo) that follow from it. Taking inspiration from this literature and placing it in conversation with Native and Indigenous scholarship and a series of contemporary socio-environmental struggles occurring in Latin America and beyond, this course will discuss the conceptual-methodological tools that a concern with politics of matter has generated. The epistemic and political implications of these tools go beyond their analytical usefulness as innovative devices to explore novel phenomena. They complicate well-established fields of inquiry, such as political ecology and economy, environmental studies, ethics, social justice, and modern politics; and, indeed, the singular ontology that these fields may inadvertently and explicitly sustain. We will explore how it is that things, stuff, matter, 'nature' came to fall outside modern politics as such, and the kinds of ethico-political repercussions that problematizing this division may produce.

ANTH 322 Bodies of Water: Conflicts and Collaborations around Wetlands and Watersheds

In less than half a decade, the idea that "nature" possesses inalienable rights akin to human rights has gone from a strictly theoretical concept to the basis of policy changes in several countries and U.S. municipalities. This seminar will introduce students to current legal, political, ethical, and practical debates about the implementation and impacts of granting "rights to nature" in these different contexts with a particular focus on the rights associated with bodies of water. We will begin by examining how the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) supported citizens of Tamaqua, Pennsylvania to write the world's first local "rights of nature" ordinance. We will then go on to compare the politics of "rights of nature" cases in Ecuador, New Zealand, India, and Colombia paying special attention to the cases of rivers. We will focus on the ways biocentric constitutional moves may transform concepts and understandings of environmental justice and socio-environmental conflicts. In particular, how the recognition of "nature" as a victim of war may transform understandings of violence, and hence, approaches to constructing peace and engaging and reparative and restorative practices within the larger framework of planetary and community efforts to mitigate climate change, deforestation, and the degradation of watersheds and wetlands. Lastly, we will explore the possibilities and tensions between community decision-making, the "rights of nature," and national level policies regarding the intensification of extractive activities and questions of territorial ordinance as they relate to mulitiple bodies of water.

Taught by: Lyons

Course not offered every year

Activity: Seminar

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 323 Origins of Art / Origins of Writing

Each of the earliest systems of writing had intimate and enduring ties to pictorial traditions. This seminar addresses the fundamental relationship between texts and visual imagery in the Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Chinese, and Maya traditions. The class will take a comparative approach to examine the parallel development of scripts and images, extending from their earliest beginnings to their on-going lives as mature systems. As the individual scripts became more capable of representing speech, the subject matter, composition, and function of images changed, and one goal of this class is to identify these processes. Emphasis will be put on seeing text and image as collaborative and interactive constructions, in which parts of a single message can be encoded and presented in different ways. The class will make extensive use of the collections and the curatorial expertise of the Penn Museum.

ANTH 325 Who Owns the Past? Archaeology and Politics in the Middle East

This course explores the role of cultural heritage and archaeological discoveries in the politics of the Middle East from the nineteenth century to the recent aftermath of the Arab Spring. We will explore how modern Middle East populations relate to their pasts and how archaeology and cultural heritage have been employed to support particular political and social agendas, including colonialism, nationalism, imperialism, and the construction of ethnic-religious identities. Although it was first introduced to the Middle East as a colonial enterprise by European powers, archaeology became a pivotal tool for local populations of the Middle East to construct new histories and identities during the post-World War I period of intensive nation-building after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. To understand this process, we will first look at the nineteenth-century establishment of archaeology by institutions like the Penn Museum. Then we will move on to individual case studies in Turkey, Iraq, Egypt, Israel/Palestine, Iran, and the republics of former Soviet Transcaucasia to look at the role of archaeology and cultural heritage in the formation of these countries as modern nation-states with a shared identity among citizens. We will conclude with an examination of the recent impact of the Islamic State on material heritage in Syria and Iraq, the changing attitudes of Middle Eastern countries toward foreign museums, and the role of UNESCO in defining Middle Eastern sites of world heritage. The course will also include field trips to the Penn Museum.

This course analyzes cultural performances as sites for the formation, expression, and transmission of social identity. Students will read ethnographies, critiques, and reports of performance genres including ritual, theater, music, dance, art, and spoken word, with a particular focus on Native American and Indigenous arts and expressions. Topics include: expressive culture as survivance; debates around authenticity and invented traditions; public identity and sexuality; political resistance; the effects of globalization; transnationalism and hybridity; cultural appropriation; and the transformation of folk performances in the wake of modern media.

Taught by: Bruchac

One-term course offered either term

Activity: Lecture

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 329 Psychoanalytic and Anthropological Perspectives on Childhood

How do people become who they are, both similar to others and uniquely individual? How might these similarities and differences be shaped by childhood experiences in family, community, and societies around the world? How do children develop emotionally? Morally? What features of human development, expression of emotions, and relational patterns are universal for our species? What features are not universal? And what is and is not known about these questions? In this course, we will consider these and many other questions. We will read about and discuss complex and dynamic interactions between culture and individual psychology, and between nature and nurture from birth to adulthood. We will carefully examine various phases of human development as described by psychoanalysts and anthropologists. The course includes anthropologic and psychoanalytic readings and videotapes, as well as literature, fairy tales, and mythologies from cultures around the world. The instructors are both psychoanalysts, one a psychiatrist and one a pediatrician. The course counts towards the Psychoanalytic Studies (PSYS) Minor.

Pain can be a particularly complex and morally charged object of biomedicine. The interiority of pain- the deeply private nature of pain experience- complicates its communication. Pain, particularly its chronic form, defies purely biological explanation, troubling fundamental biomedical distinctions between mind and body, subject and object. And decisions about analgesia are fraught, as doctors and patients pursue relief from pain amidst a widespread epidemic of opiate abuse that infuses their interaction with concerns about addiction, drug seeking, culpability, and responsibility. This seminar seeks to shed light on these issues by using concepts from linguistic and medical anthropology to explore how we experience, think about, and talk about pain. As an interdisciplinary endeavor, the course is of relevance not only to anthropology but also to medical sociology, medical ethics, public health, health policy, and science and technology studies.

Taught by: Justin Clapp

Course not offered every year

Activity: Seminar

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 334 Feminist Ethnography

This course will investigate the relationships among women, gender, sexuality, and anthropological research. We will begin by exploring the trajectory of research interest in women and gender, drawing first from the early work on gender and sex by anthropologists like Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict; moving through the 1970s and 1980s arguments about gender, culture, and political economy; arriving at more current concerns with gender, race, sexuality, and empire. For the rest of the semester, we will critically read contemporary ethnographies addressing pressing issues such as nationalism, militarism, neoliberalism and fundamentalism. Throughout, we will investigate what it means not only to "write women's worlds", but also to analyze broader socio-cultural, political, and economic processes through a gendered lens. We will, finally, address the various ways feminist anthropology fundamentally challenged the discipline's epistemological certainties, as well as how it continues to transform our understanding of the foundations of the modern world. Prerequisite: Should have some functional knowledge of Cultural Anthropology.

The peopling of the Americas is a question that has intrigued scholars and laymen for over 500 years. The origin of Native Americans was also a seminal issue during the emergence of American Anthropology as a discipline at the turn of the 20th century, with research on this topic animating current studies of ethnohistory, indigenous archeology, post-colonialism and repatriation. The proposed course will review the scholarship dedicated to describing this long history from an interdisciplinary perspective. It will explore their roots in the expansion of modern humans into Eurasia, evaluate the new archeological and genetic research that has fundamentally altered our understanding of the migration history and diversity of indigenous peoples in the American continents, and examine issues of identity, ethnicity and cultural heritage in contemporary Native populations that extend from this knowledge. The course will further draw on the instructor's fieldwork experience working with indigenous communities in Alaska, Canada, the Lower 48, Mexico and the Caribbean, as well as native Siberians in Russia, where the cultural and biological roots of ancestral Native American populations lie.

This course will introduce students to applied anthropology methods for doing research that can change policy and practices. Examples of policy and practice change include clinical practices in health care settings, social welfare policy, and legal advocacy. Students will be trained in multiple anthropology research methods, including brief participant-observation, presentation of self in the field, entering the field in diverse cultural environments, qualitative interviewing, life story interviewing, and ethnographic content analysis of textual material. Students will also learn how to use NVivo software for analyzing qualitative and some quantitative data from their field notes, interviews, and analysis of popular articles/websites. Finally, students will practice writing products for non-academic audiences, such as policymakers, the media, and the general public. The course will emphasize using anthropology research methods to address real-world problems in policy and practice in diverse cultural contexts. This course is a service learning class affiliated with the Netter Center and a Benjamin Franklin Scholars course.

Taught by: Sahota

Activity: Seminar

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 342 Dress and Fashion in Africa

Throughout Africa, social and cultural identities of ethnicity, gender, generation, rank and status were conveyed in a range of personal ornamentation that reflects the variation of African cultures. The meaning of one particular item of clothing can transform completely when moved across time and space. As one of many forms of expressive culture, dress shape and give forms to social bodies. In the study of dress and fashion, we could note two distinct broad approaches, the historical and the anthropological. While the former focuses on fashion as a western system that shifted across time and space, and linked with capitalism and western modernity; the latter approach defines dress as an assemblage of modification the body. The Africanist proponents of this anthropological approach insisted that fashion is not a dress system specific to the west and not tied with the rise of capitalism. This course will focus on studying the history of African dress by discussing the forces that have impacted and influenced it overtime, such as socio-economic, colonialism, religion, aesthetics, politics, globalization, and popular culture. The course will also discuss the significance of the different contexts that impacted the choices of what constitute an appropriate attire for distinct situations. African dress in this context is not a fixed relic from the past, but a live cultural item that is influenced by the surrounding forces.

What can video art, experimental documentary, and sensory ethnography teach us about the practice of urban research? How can we build on the traditions of first person and essay cinema to produce compelling documents of our own questions and findings? This course surveys a range of film and video works on themes such as the production of space, urban nature, infrastructure, and collective memory. Taken as a genre, these time-based works provide a powerful model for training scholars' observational skills, conceptualizing scales of analysis, and engaging broader publics in urban research. In this course, we will explore this audiovisual genre in dialogue with selected theoretical, ethnographic, and case study readings in urban studies. As an advanced theory-practice course, it combines seminar readings and discussion with regular screenings and a series of workshops on photo, video, audio, and postproduction skills. The course will provide a general fluency in contemporary urban research, with particular emphasis on urban political ecology. In dialogue with this scholarship, students will develop and situate their own experimental documentary research projects.

This course introduces students to theory and methodology of the geospatial humanities and social sciences, understood broadly as the application of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and spatial analysis techniques to the study of social and cultural patterns in the past and present. By engaging with spatial theory, spatial analysis case studies, and technical methodologies, students will develop an understanding of the questions driving, and tools available for, humanistic and social science research projects that explore change over space and time. We will use ESRI's ArcGIS software to visualize, analyze, and integrate historical, anthropological, and environmental data. Techniques will be introduced through the discussion of case studies and through demonstration of software skills. During supervised laboratory sessions, the various techniques and analyses covered will be applied to sample data and also to data from a region/topic chosen by the student.

Modern business corporations can be characterized as having their own internal cultures, more or less distinct from one another. They also exist within encompassing cultures and cultural flows. At the same time, corporations are producers and disseminators, and thus have effects on their surrounding environments, effects that extend from the local to the global. This course examines modern corporations from these three perspectives through theoretical and ethnographic readings, guest speakers from the corporate world, and independent research conducted by the students. Course requirements include student presentations of their research and readings; one or more take-home exams; and a final research paper.

One-term course offered either term

Activity: Seminar

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 350 Archaeology of Civilizations in South America

This course provides a basic survey of the archaeology of civilizations of South America (the Andean region of the central highland and coastal areas that today are Peru and Bolivia and parts of Ecuador, Chile, and Argentina). Topics include the history of South American archaeology, peopling of the continent, origins and evolution of agriculture, early village life, ceremonial and domestic architecture, prehistoric art and symbolism, Andean cosmology and astronomy, indigenous technology, the historical ecology of landscapes, outside contacts and relationships, economics and trade, social and political structure, state formation and urbanism, and early contacts with Europeans. The lectures and readings are based on recent archaeological investigations and interpretations combined with appropriate analogy from ethnohistory and ethnography. The prehistory of the Amazonian lowlands and northern South America will be covered in other courses.

ANTH 351 Women Making History: The Penn Museum and the Centennial 2020

The year 2020 marks the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which declared that the right of citizens to vote "shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex". To mark this centennial - to both celebrate it and critically assess its impact on American society - we will investigate the history of women at the Penn Museum as archaeologists, ethnographers, epigraphers, philanthropists, and more. At the same time, we will examine material in the Penn Museum that women collected, donated, or studied. Our goal will be to produce original research that may contribute to future exhibits and publications as well as to broader public forums. Sponsored by the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, our seminar will focus heavily on western Asia, southeastern Europe, and North Africa - all zones that scholars have variously associated with the Near East or Middle East, and where the Penn Museum has been active since its foundation in 1887. To situate the Penn Museum and its collections within a global and comparative frame, we will also study select women who made major scholarly contributions to other parts of the world such as the Americas and Oceania. Among the figures we will study are Sarah Yorke Stevenson (Egypt), Katharine Woolley (Mesopotamia/Iraq), Harriet Boyd Hawes (Ottoman Crete and Greece), Florence Shotridge (Alaska), Zelia Nuttall (Mexico and Russia), and Tatiana Proskouriakoff (Guatemala). We will venture into many different kinds of history. In regional terms, our scope will be transnational and international: we will cover the United States and the Middle East in the wider world. In thematic and methodological terms, we will approach our subject through biography, oral history, and microhistory; material history and museum studies; cultural and intellectual history; women's and gender studies; and the history of academic disciplines, especially archaeology and anthropology.

Prerequisite: Some background in Middle Eastern history; or Anthropology; or Women's History; or Museum Studies

Activity: Seminar

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 359 Nutritional Anthropology

The course is an introduction to nutritional anthropology, an area of anthropology concerned with human nutrition and food systems in social, cultural and historical contexts. On the one hand, nutritional anthropologists study the significance of the food quest in terms of survival and health. On the other hand, they also know that people eat food for a variety of reasons that may have little, if anything, to do with nutrition, health, or survival. While the availability of food is dependent upon the physical environment, food production systems, and economic resources, food choice and the strategies human groups employ to gain access to and distribute food are deeply embedded in specific cultural patterns, social relationships, and political and economic systems. Thus, nutritional anthropology represents the interface between anthropology and the nutritional sciences, and as such, can provide powerful insights into the interactions of social and biological factors in the context of the nutritional health of individuals and populations. Because food and nutrition are quintessential biocultural issues, the course takes a biocultural approach drawing on perspectives from biological, socio-cultural and political-economic anthropology. Course content will include: a discussion of approaches to nutritional anthropology; basics of human nutrition; food systems, food behaviors and ideas; methods of dietary and nutritional assessment; and a series of case studies addressing causes and consequences to nutritional problems across the world.

This is an interdisciplinary course on the problems of food demand and consumption, production and supply in our increasingly globalized and urbanizing world. Special attention will be given to the intersections of current technologies of food production, current nutritional problems, environmental change and resource degradation, and the changing quality of human social life under globalization. Where and how will sufficient nutritious food be produced sustainably and how can the politics and economics of equitable distribution in such large urban populations be achieved? (Previously ANTH 561)

Digital methodologies are now an integral part of archaeological practice and archaeologists are now expected to possess basic computing skills and be familiar with a range of data collection, analysis and visualization techniques. This course will use case studies and applied learning opportunities centered on a course project to explore a broad array of digital approaches in archaeology. The technological underpinnings, professional procedures, and influences on archaeological practice and theory will be discussed for each method covered in the course. Applied learning opportunities in digital data collection methods will include aerial and satellite image analysis, global navigation satellite system (GNSS) survey, 3D scanning methods, close-range photogrammetry, and near-surface geophysical prospection. Students will also have opportunities for practical experience in digital database design and management, geographic information science (GIS) and 3D visualization. Students will communicate the results of the course project in a digital story that will be presented at the end of the term. Prior archaeological classwork and/or experience preferred.

Why do black cultural producers turn to the speculative? What, in turn, is speculative about blackness? These questions frame this seminar's exploration of how black artists, theorists, and activists imagine different futures, often in the service of critiquing power asymmetries and creating radical transformation in the present. We will explore how the speculative works differently across black literature, visual culture and performance. Additionally, inspired by the multi-disciplinary work that we encounter in the course, we will experiment with crafting our own embodied speculative art in order to better understand its function as both art practice and politics. The course will be divided between discussions centered on close reading of primary and secondary material and creative writing/movement exploration (no previous movement experience necessary). Occasional guest lectures with visiting artists will provide additional fodder for our critical and creative work.

The goal of this course is to understand and to investigate both historical and contemporary issues related to a culture of consumption. Reading topics cover both contemporary and scholarly issues in cultural anthropology, popular culture, consumer behavior, off-shore production, social networking, media and communications, financial and real estate markets and marketing. Class distinctions are equally interdisciplinary as we focus on investigating and identifying critical global/local linkages. We analyze the various ways in which Philadelphia and other "global cities" are competing for consumer revenues. We ask what factors have led contemporary society reaching its current stage of mass consumption and how have certain goods and services been reconfigured, packaged or re-packaged to attract new consumers. In order to better understand the link between consumption and production factors we explore the relationship between outsourcing and/or offshore production and modern consumption. Approximately sixty percent of the seminar takes place in the classroom and will include lecture, class discussion, and films. The remaining portion of the class meetings will involve local and regional travel. Research assignments emphasize the use of anthropological participant-observation techniques to investigate the relationships between culture and contemporary mass consumption within the contexts of re-gentrification, urbanization, and globalization.

What does the digital age mean for humanistic, social scientific, and professional inquiry and practice? How do non-text based formats - such as film, dance and other kinds of performance, creative writing, and soundscapes - transform both the processes and products of research? How do they inform and transform our disciplines, and what might this mean for the communities with which we work? This advanced undergraduate seminar will address these (and other related) questions. Taught by the invited Fellows from the Center for Experimental Ethnography, this course will take shape differently each semester according to the Fellow's area of expertise and practice. Students will be encouraged to explore alternative formats of representation that move beyond text while still being grounded in ethnographic research, and they will develop skills in relevant media. https://www.sas.upenn.edu/anthropology/courses/topics-courses

Taught by: Varied

One-term course offered either term

Activity: Seminar

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 402 Applied Research Skills in Global Community Health

While political borders remain, social and human borders fall with the increasing movement of people, ideas, and resources across geographies. What is global becomes local. While biomedical and counting sciences advance, the human experience and influence remain core to understanding behavior, beliefs, and awareness. What is human remains paramount. The Maya Western Highlands of Guatemala are undergoing health changes (trauma, maternal-infant health, diabetes, mental health) through economic development and continued human migration to and from the US. The Cobbs Creek neighborhood in West Philadelphia is also facing epidemics of non-communicable diseases. In this context, Applied Skills in Global Community Health will provide academic and professional skills development in comparing the role of culture, history and politics in the health of a population in transition (demographic, nutritional, epidemiologic, economic) in both settings. Classroom work will occur in the spring of each year combined with a short (1 wk) field experience in the Western Highlands of Guatemala. In addition students will examine health and community research in the Cobbs Creek neighborhood of West Philadelphia. Students may substitute 10 week field work as part of the companion course ANTH 403 for the 1 week experience.

Taught by: Barg/Bream

Course usually offered in spring term

Activity: Seminar

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 403 Field Experience in Global Community Health

The Maya Western Highlands of Guatemala are undergoing health changes (trauma, maternal-infant health, diabetes, mental health) through economic development and continued human migration to and from the US. The communities of Santiago Atitlan, Solola, San Jaun Sacatepequez, and Coatepeque have community based infrastructures (public health clinics, private NGOs, and research projects) that work to address these health changes. In this context, the Field Experience in Global Community Health will provide applied academic and professional skills development in data collection, analysis, and reporting. Field work will occur in the summer of each year combined with a campus based skills development experience.

Taught by: Barg/Bream

Course usually offered in fall term

Activity: Independent Study

0.5 Course Units

ANTH 404 Introduction to the Human Skeleton

An introduction to the anatomy and biology of the human skeleton. Laboratory work will be supplemented by lectures and demonstrations on the development structure, function, and evolution of the human skeleton.

Taught by: Monge

Course not offered every year

Activity: Lecture

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 407 Human Evolution

An examination of fossils and other evidence documenting human evolution. Lectures and readings are supplemented with slide and fossil reproduction materials.

This course introduces the study of animal bones from archaeological sites. Faunal analysis is an interdisciplinary science which draws methods from archaeology, biology, and paleontology. Bones, shells, and other remains yield evidence for the use of animals by humans, and evidence for the biology of animals and for past environments. The course will focus on research approaches to important transitions in human-animal relationships: the development of human hunting and fishing, animal domestication, early pastoralism, and the emergence of market economies in animal products. Class presentations will include lectures and discussion concerning research design and archaeological case material, with additional videos, slidework with field and laboratory equipment, and supervised work identifying and describing archaeological materials from the University Museum's collections. This class is taught in the Zooarchaeology Laboratory of the Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Materials

In ancient times, materials such as stone and metals were used to produce artifacts including pigments, jewelry, tools, and weapons. This course is designed to introduce students to research on the early exploitation of mineral resources. Which techniques were used to access and process raw materials in antiquity? Which archaeological methods can be used to investigate these features and artifacts? The course will provide worldwide examples through time, ranging from Stone Age flint mining, Iron Age rock salt mining to Medieval silver mining. Ethnographic studies and hands-on activities will contribute to our understanding of mining in archaeology, and artifacts from the Museum's collections will undergo scientific analysis in the Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Materials. Prerequisite: Desired but not mandatory: ANTH 221/521 Material World in Archaeological Science

Anthropology provides a critical lens through which we can understand the multiple ways that environmental toxins affect human health and well-being. In this course, we will explore ways that politics, economics, social dynamics and communication strategies affect the uneven distribution of risk from environmental hazards. We will examine issues related to community engagement, environmental justice, risk perception, citizen science and environmental stigma. Students will have an opportunity to visit a local Superfund site.

Taught by: Barg

Course offered fall; odd-numbered years

Activity: Seminar

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 424 Political Ecologies of the City

Cities have been centres of aspiration for much of human history. They have provided a limited yet critical locus for social mobility, both in political and economic terms. As large agglomerations of political and economic power, urban residents have also consumed growing proportions of the earths mineral, food and water resources from the national (and international) body. The contradictory aspects of urban aspiration frame this course. Drawing on the frameworks of political ecology, in this course we think through the cities of the global south to understand how cities are made. To do this, we will first focus on the construction on the liberal city and how it has been occupied, both formally and informally, by urban subjects in most of the world. Next, we will learn about projects through which natural resources have been directed to and through the city. Finally we will conclude with a particular attention to how urban resources are claimed by marginalized migrants, and the particular sorts of governance institutions these practices engender.

This seminar draws from social scientific and scientific literatures to explore current themes in the anthropology of the environment. We will investigate the links between climate change science and social science, and the ways in which anthropologists can contribute via in-depth fieldwork methodology and long engagement in issues of society-environment interactions. We will also explore how potential environmental, social, and biological impacts of global warming on the future are being assessed through conceptual paradigms linked to risk, probability, scenario forecasting, tipping points, planetary boundaries, and extinction.

Taught by: Petryna

Activity: Seminar

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 433 Andean Archaeology

Consideration of the culture history of the native peoples of the Andean area, with emphasis on the pre-conquest archaeology of the Central-Andean region.

Interactions between humans and the living landscape around us have played - and continue to play - a fundamental role in shaping our worldview. This course is designed to introduce students to the diverse ways in which humans interact with plants. We will focus on the integration of ethnographic information and archaeological case studies in order to understand the range of interactions between humans and plants, as well as how plants and people have profoundly changed one another. Topics will include the origins of agriculture; cooking and plant processing; human health and the world of ethnomedicine; and poisonous and psychoactive plants. We will examine ancient plant material firsthand at the Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Materials (CAAM) and will handle botanical ecofacts from the Penn Museum's collections. Students will also carry out a substantial research project focused on an archaeological culture and plant species of their own interest.

In this course we will examine key issues and the processes involved in human growth and development. By their very nature, growth and development are biocultural processes that require an integrated analysis of social construction and biological phenomena. As such, we will incorporate insight from evolutionary theory, ecology, developmental biology, psychology, human biology, and cultural anthropology in our study of growth and development. Such an integrated perspective will help students to see that development is not just a biological unfolding from birth through adolescence and adulthood. Rather, development is best understood as process that is deeply intertwined with the environment within which the organism develops. Additionally, we will apply these biocultural and socio-ecological insights to emerging health challenges associated with various developmental stages. The study of human growth and development is useful to all students in biological, health-related, and social sciences. Course enrollment is restricted to juniors, seniors, and graduate students only.

Taught by: Hoke

Course not offered every year

Activity: Seminar

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 451 Historical Archaeology

Archaeology of the Modern World from the Columbian voyage (1492) to the 20th century. Topics such as the rise of early modern Europe, European exploration and colonization, African American Archaeology, Asian American Archaeology, the rise of colonial society, contact with native peoples, the Industrial Revolution, and the archaeology of the 20th century will be covered.

This course is designed to provide students with a basic understanding of how to work with and present quantitative data. Topics include graphical display of numerical data, probability, sampling, descriptive and inferential statistics (parametric and non-parametric two-and three group tests, regression and correlation). Using examples drawn from the social sciences and anthropology, the focus is on teaching the logic behind quantitative arguments and statistical tests, rather than on the mathematical formulas, making the course especially relevant for students who do not have a strong background in mathematics. This course fulfills the Colleges Quantitative Data Analysis requirement.

One-term course offered either term

Activity: Lecture

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 508 Conservation of Archaeological Sites and Landscapes

This seminar will address the history, theories, principles, and practices of the preservation and interpretation of archaeological sites and landscapes. The course will draw from a wide range of published material and experiences representing both national and international contexts. Topics will include site and landscape documentation and recording; site formation and degradation; intervention strategies including interpretation and display, legislation, policy, and contemporary issues of descendent community ownership and global heritage. Depending on the site, students will study specific issues leading toward the critique or development of a conservation and management program in accordance with guidelines established by ICOMOS/ ICAHM and other official agencies.

This seminar will explore some of the most important issues that are now a central part of archaeological, anthropological and historical research throughout the world. The identification and control of cultural heritage is a central part of the framework for research within other communities. Issues for this course will also include cultural identity, human rights, repatriation, colonialism, working with communities and many other topics. Field research today must be based upon a new series of ethical standards that will be discussed and examined within this class. Major topics include: cultural heritage - definitions and constructs, cosmopolitanism and collecting, archaeology and looting, cultural heritage preservation, museums - universal and national, museum acquisition policies, cultural identity, international conventions (including underwater issues), national laws of ownership, community based development, cultural tourism, development models, and human rights.

Introduction to thin-section petrography of stone and ceramic archaeological materials. Using polarized light microscopy, the first half of this course will cover the basics of mineralogy and the petrography of igneous, metamorphic and sedimentary rocks. The second half will focus on the petrographic description of ceramic materials, mainly pottery, with emphasis on the interpretation of provenance and technology. As part of this course, students will characterize and analyze archaeological samples from various collections. Prior knowledge of geology is not required.

This course will introduce students to the rich literature that has grown up around the encounter between psychoanalysis and anthropology, from totem and taboo, to studies of the Oedipus complex, child-rearing practices, ritual symbolism, mythology, and dreams. The class will also look to the future, endeavoring to examine as well such issues as the role of computers (are they self objects?) and the internet (including such online games as "Second Life"), dreams in space alien abduction narratives, sexuality in advertising, political psychology, and other contemporary issues. This course counts towards towards the Psychoanalytic Studies (PSYS) Minor.

By focusing on the scientific analysis of inorganic archaeological materials, this course will explore processes of creation in the past. ANTH 221/521 will take place in the Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Materials (CAAM) and will be team taught in three modules: analysis of lithics, analysis of ceramics and analysis of metals. Each module will combine laboratory and classroom exercises to give students hands-on experience with archaeological materials. We will examine how the transformation of materials into objects provides key information about past human behaviors and the socio-economic contexts of production, distribution, exchange and use. Discussion topics will include invention and adoption of new technologies, change and innovation, use of fire, and craft specialization.

Intentional destruction of cultural heritage is designed to erase the presence of a people in history and has become an all too familiar feature of the devastation wrought by contemporary violence and "ethnic cleansing." Recent cases appear frequently in news headlines and include such well-known examples as the 2001 demolition of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan, the 2012 destruction of Sufi shrines in Timbuktu, Mali, and the recent obliteration of historic sites across Syria and Iraq. This course explores this phenomenon by examining such questions as: Why is cultural heritage targeted in conflict? Under what circumstances? By whom? In so doing, we will engage with readings that discuss the historical development of the international laws and norms that aim to protect cultural heritage during conflict and examples successful and unsuccessful humanitarian interventions.

Taught by: Brian Daniels

Course not offered every year

Activity: Lecture

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 529 Psychoanalytic and Anthropological Perspectives on Childhood

How do people become who they are, both similar to others and uniquely individual? How might these similarities and differences be shaped by childhood experiences in family, community, and societies around the world? How do children develop emotionally? Morally? What features of human development, expression of emotions, and relational patterns are universal for our species? What features are not universal? And what is and is not known about these questions? In this course, we will consider these and many other questions. We will read about and discuss complex and dynamic interactions between culture and individual psychology, and between nature and nurture from birth to adulthood. We will carefully examine various phases of human development as described by psychoanalysts and anthropologists. The course includes anthropologic and psychoanalytic readings and videotapes, as well as literature, fairy tales, and mythologies from cultures around the world. The instructors are both psychoanalysts, one a psychiatrist and one a pediatrician. The course counts towards the Psychoanalytic Studies (PSYS) Minor.

ANTH 531 Women Making History: The Penn Museum and the Centennial 2020

The year 2020 marks the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which declared that the right of citizens to vote "shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex". To mark this centennial - to both celebrate it and critically assess its impact on American society - we will investigate the history of women at the Penn Museum as archaeologists, ethnographers, epigraphers, philanthropists, and more. At the same time, we will examine material in the Penn Museum that women collected, donated, or studied. Our goal will be to produce original research that may contribute to future exhibits and publications as well as to broader public forums. Sponsored by the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, our seminar will focus heavily on western Asia, southeastern Europe, and North Africa - all zones that scholars have variously associated with the Near East or Middle East, and where the Penn Museum has been active since its foundation in 1887. To situate the Penn Museum and its collections within a global and comparative frame, we will also study select women who made major scholarly contributions to other parts of the world such as the Americas and Oceania. Among the figures we will study are Sarah Yorke Stevenson (Egypt), Katharine Woolley (Mesopotamia/Iraq), Harriet Boyd Hawes (Ottoman Crete and Greece), Florence Shotridge (Alaska), Zelia Nuttall (Mexico and Russia), and Tatiana Proskouriakoff (Guatemala). We will venture into many different kinds of history. In regional terms, our scope will be transnational and international: we will cover the United States and the Middle East in the wider world. In thematic and methodological terms, we will approach our subject through biography, oral history, and microhistory; material history and museum studies; cultural and intellectual history; women's and gender studies; and the history of academic disciplines, especially archaeology and anthropology.

Prerequisite: Some background in Middle Eastern history; or Anthropology; or Women's History; or Museum Studies

Activity: Seminar

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 533 Archaeobotany Seminar

In this course we will approach the relationship between plants and people from archaeological and anthropological perspectives in order to investigate diverse plant consumption, use, and management strategies. Topics will include: archaeological formation processes, archaeobotanical sampling and recovery, lab sorting and identification, quantification methods, and archaeobotany as a means of preserving cultural heritage. Students will learn both field procedures and laboratory methods of archaeobotany through a series of hands-on activities and lab-based experiments. The final research project will involve an original in-depth analysis and interpretation of archaeobotanical specimens. By the end of the course, students will feel comfortable reading and evaluating archaeobotanical literature and will have a solid understanding of how archaeobotanists interpret human activities of the past.

The peopling of the Americas is a question that has intrigued scholars and laymen for over 500 years. The origin of Native Americans was also a seminal issue during the emergence of American Anthropology as a discipline at the turn of the 20th century, with research on this topic animating current studies of ethnohistory, indigenous archeology, post-colonialism and repatriation. The proposed course will review the scholarship dedicated to describing this long history from an interdisciplinary perspective. It will explore their roots in the expansion of modern humans into Eurasia, evaluate the new archeological and genetic research that has fundamentally altered our understanding of the migration history and diversity of indigenous peoples in the American continents, and examine issues of identity, ethnicity and cultural heritage in contemporary Native populations that extend from this knowledge. The course will further draw on the instructor's fieldwork experience working with indigenous communities in Alaska, Canada, the Lower 48, Mexico and the Caribbean, as well as native Siberians in Russia, where the cultural and biological roots of ancestral Native American populations lie.

This broadly interdisciplinary course is designed for Graduate and Undergraduate Fellows in the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities (PPEH) who hail from departments across Arts and Sciences as well as other schools at the university. The course is also open to others with permission of the instructors. Work in environmental humanities by necessity spans academic disciplines. By design, it can also address and engage publics beyond traditional academic settings. This seminar, with limited enrollment, explores best practices in public environmental humanities. Students receive close mentoring to develop and execute cross-disciplinary, public engagement projects on the environment.

This course examines the possibilities and limitations of conceiving of and realizing citizenship on a global scale. Readings, guest lecturers, and discussions will focus on dilemmas associated with addressing issues that transcend national boundaries. In particular, the course compares global/local dynamics that emerge across different types of improvement efforts focusing on distinctive institutions and social domains, including: educational development; human rights; humanitarian aid; free trade; micro-finance initiatives; and the global environmental movement. The course has two objectives: to explore research and theoretical work related to global citizenship, social engagement, and international development; and to discuss ethical and practical issues that emerge in the local contexts where development initiatives are implemented.

An introduction to the intent, approach, and contribution of anthropology to the study of socialization and schooling in cross-cultural perspective. Education is examined in traditional, colonial, and complex industrial societies.

The subject matter of this seminar will vary by term and instructor. Each course will concern itself with contemporary archaeology through an in-depth examination of new directions in archaeological method and theory. Please check https://www.sas.upenn.edu/anthropology/courses/topics-courses for the term-specific course description.

Taught by: Kassabaum

Course not offered every year

Activity: Seminar

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 551 Experimental Ethnography at the Interfaces of the Arts & Sciences

This course takes inspiration from conversations and practices occurring at the interfaces of cultural anthropology, the environmental humanities, and feminist science studies. Anthropologist Stuart McLean (2017) has asked: "What might become of anthropology if it were to suspend its sometime claims to be a social science? What if it were to turn instead to exploring its affinities with art and literature as a mode of engaged creative practice carried forward in a world heterogeneously composed of humans and other than humans?" At the same time, the emergence of the environmental humanities as an academic discipline in the twenty-first century reflects the growing conviction on the part of diverse sectors that "environmental" problems cannot be solved by science and technology alone. Instead, cultivation of experimental methods and alliance building between the arts and social and natural sciences has become ever more important strategy in terms of fomenting public engaged scholarship. In this course, we will not necessarily suspend the social scientific claims of anthropology, and ethnography more specifically, but we will push our methodological premises and conceptual work to experiment with our objects of study, matters of concern, and the diverse materialities that emerge from and participate in our ethnographic work.

Advanced seminar for potential professional archaeologists. Course will examine critically main past and present theoretical issues in archaeological research and interpretation, and consider various methodologies utilized towards these interpretive ends. Prerequisite: If course requirement not met, permission of instructor required.

This is an intensive, graduate-level, practice-based course in which students will record, edit, and produce anthropologically informed audio works that record and interpret culture and lived experience. Projects in this class will look beyond conventional linguistic or musical codes to sounds whose semiotic or affective value may be less immediately evident. Through the process of making location recordings, analyzing those recordings, composing them into autonomous works, and critiquing every step of the way, this course will engage with questions of ethnographic representation through the medium of sound. In parallel with contextualizing readings and sound projections, throughout the semester students will work intensively on audio projects, receiving training on recording techniques, audio editing, and basic post-production techniques. The course is an opportunity to open up the question of what might constitute 'audio documentary' or 'ethnographic audio'. Presentation strategies for final projects will be discussed and decided on individual bases. Projects will be situated in relationship to cognate fields, including the anthropology of the senses, interdisciplinary sound studies, ethnomusicology, ethnographic cinema, sound art, sound mapping, soundscape composition, and experimental nonfiction media practices which involve location recording. Through weekly sound projections and home listening, students will also gain a familiarity with existing genres and uses of nonfiction audio in anthropology and related fields.

"This graduate course introduces students to theories, practices, and critiques of critical ethnography. Ethnography -- an approach to the study of culture which anthropologist James Clifford described as a process that "translates experiences into text" - will have our full attention. This process of translation, although seemingly straightforward, requires layers of interpretation, selection, and the imposition of a viewpoint or politics. While ethnography is often narrowly conceived of as a methodology, this course considers ethnography as a mode of inquiry, as a philosophy, as an ongoing question and performance. We wrestle with notions of "the self" and "the other" at the intersection of imbricated cultural and performance worlds. Together we'll ask: How is ethnography both critical and performative? What is the relationship between theory and method? How can we evaluate ethnographic work? And finally, what kinds of ethnographers do we want to be? This course considers a range of ethnographic examples in order to analyze both the craft and the stakes of "translating experiences into text."

Digital methodologies are an integral part of contemporary archaeological practice, and demand that archaeologists to hold a new set of skills and knowledge fundamentals. This course will expose students to a broad range of digital approaches through a review of relevant literature and through applied learning opportunities centered on a course project. The technological underpinnings, best practices, and influences on archaeological practice and theory will be discussed for each method covered in the course. Applied learning opportunities in digital data collection methods will include: aerial and satellite remote sensing, global navigation satellite system (GNSS) survey, 3D scanning methods, close-range photogrammetry, and near-surface geophysical prospection. Students will also have opportunities for practical experience in digital database design and management, geographic information science (GIS) and 3D modeling and visualization. Students will communicate the results of the course project in a digital story that will be presented at the end of the term. Prior archaeological classwork and/or experience preferred.

This seminar explores the historical ecology of European colonial expansion in a comparative framework, concentrating on the production of "periphery" and the transformation of incorporated societies and environments. We begin with a discussion of the theoretical frameworks, sources of evidence, and analytical strategies employed by researchers to address the conjunction of environmental and human history in colonial contexts, including underdevelopment and global systems of circulation; political ecology; and ecological imperialism. We then discuss the circulation of persons, crops, invasives, and microbes as fundamental conditions of emerging global systems. Drawing on these elements, we discuss landscapes as sites of misrecognition, rationalization, and cultural production. This discussion sets the stage for an examination of novel forms of economic and ecological production, including the emergence of the 'drug foods', the transformation of forest products, and the rise of the plantation. We then consider the political ecology of crisis in colonial settings, including agrarian collapse, famine, and 'ecological poverty.'

Taught by: Lycett

Course not offered every year

Prerequisite: Open to advanced undergraduates

Activity: Seminar

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 567 Living World in Archaeological Science

By focusing on the scientific analysis of archaeological remains, this course will explore life and death in the past. It takes place in the Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Materials (CAAM) and is team taught in three modules: human skeletal analysis, analysis of animal remains, and analysis of plant remains. Each module will combine laboratory and classroom exercises to give students hands-on experience with archaeological materials. We will examine how organic materials provide key information about past environments, human behavior, and cultural change through discussions of topics such as health and disease, inequality, and food.

Near-surface geophysical prospection methods are now widely used in archaeology as they allow archaeologists to rapidly map broad areas, minimize or avoid destructive excavation, and perceive physical dimensions of archaeological features that are outside of the range of human perception. This course will cover the theory of geophysical sensors commonly used in archaeological investigations and the methods for collecting, processing, and interpreting geophysical data from archaeological contexts. We will review the physical properties of common archaeological and paleoenvironmental targets, the processes that led to their deposition and formation, and how human activity is reflected in anomalies recorded through geophysical survey through lectures, readings, and discussion. Students will gain experience collecting data in the field with various sensors at archaeological sites in the region. A large proportion of the course will be computer-based as students work with data from geophysical sensors, focusing on the fundamentals of data processing, data fusion, and interpretation. Some familiarity with GIS is recommended.

In recent years much has been made of the "beyond text" turn in anthropology, specifically the need to re-evaluate the singular authority of "writing culture." Several new approaches advocate for non-textual medialities, with representations originating in both sonovisual media and performance. Less, however, has been theorized and advocated about intermediality and the multicompositional practices of transmediality and plurimediality, specifically their more transgressive multisensory epistemology. This course will examine these radical approaches to interacting textual, visual, sonic and performative mediations, theorizing their epistemic and ethical implications, collaborative potentials, affordances in narrative and non-narrative representation, and political and aesthetic investments. Students will both critically engage histories of transmedial anthropology, and produce projects that are multicompositional.

Domestication: one of the most frequently cited 'major transitions' in our global past. The story of domestication is not consigned to deep time though - it is interwoven with current movements. Rewilding, feralization, paleodiet, and GMO, all have intersections with the concept of domestication, and are politicised through the lens of the archaeology and anthropology of the 'domesticated'. Traditionally, study of the domestication process has been the exclusive domain of archaeologists and agricultural scientists; today it is an increasingly a multidisciplinary enterprise involving specialists across the sciences and humanities and, importantly, multiple voices that are changing the way we think about this as a single 'process'. In this seminar series we are going to unpick this term: what is 'domestication', how did (or does) it unfold, when did it start and has it ended? And perhaps most importantly, should we even be using this term at all? We will look back to the origins of the ideas, explore the influence of Darwinian thinking, 19th century philosophy, and explore alternative ideas such as familiarisation and multi-species thinking to question the dominance of 'domestication' in the archaeological and anthropological literature. The course is appropriate for graduate students interested in exploring this topic in a dynamic conversation. Students will be expected to lead discussions of specific works, as well as explore beyond the reading list or present aspects of their own present or proposed future research.

Taught by: Bates

Course not offered every year

Activity: Seminar

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 583 Ethnographic Filmmaking

This ethnographic methodology course considers filmmaking/videography as a tool in conducting ethnographic research as well as a medium for presenting academic research to scholarly and non-scholarly audiences. The course engages the methodological and theoretical implications of capturing data and crafting social scientific accounts/narratives in images and sounds. Students are required to put theory into practice by conducting ethnographic research and producing an ethnographic film as their final project. In service to that goal, students will read about ethnography (as a social scientific method and representational genre), learn and utilize ethnographic methods in fieldwork, watch non-fiction films (to be analyzed for formal properties and implicit assumptions about culture/sociality), and acquire rigorous training in the skills and craft of digital video production. This is an ABCS course, and students will produce short ethnographic films with students in Philadelphia high schools as part of a partnership project with the School District of Philadelphia. Due to the time needed for ethnographic film production, this is a year-long course, which will meet periodically in both the fall and spring semesters.

The goal of this course is to understand and to investigate both historical and contemporary issues related to a culture of consumption. Reading topics cover both contemporary and scholarly issues in cultural anthropology, popular culture, consumer behavior, off-shore production, social networking, media and communications, financial and real estate markets and marketing. Class distinctions are equally interdisciplinary as we focus on investigating and identifying critical global/local linkages. We analyze the various ways in which Philadelphia and other "global cities" are competing for consumer revenues. We ask what factors have led contemporary society reaching its current stage of mass consumption and how have certain goods and services been reconfigured, packaged or re-packaged to attract new consumers. In order to better understand the link between consumption and production factors we explore the relationship between outsourcing and/or offshore production and modern consumption. Approximately sixty percent of the seminar takes place in the classroom and will include lecture, class discussion, and films. The remaining portion of the class meetings will involve local and regional travel. Research assignments emphasize the use of anthropological participant-observation techniques to investigate the relationships between culture and contemporary mass consumption within the contexts of re-gentrification, urbanization, and globalization.

ANTH 589 It was the Law at the Time: Museums, Colonialism, and the Question of Property

Current discussions about who owns cultural property, especially in relation to objects acquired under and during Europe's colonial project, form their arguments, limits and possibilities around international legal instruments such as UNESCO's conventions on cultural property. Like broader claims for reparations by formally colonized peoples, legal demands for reparations or restitution with regard to cases of colonial injustice often run up against responses such as 'it was the law at the time' or 'it was a long, long time ago and therefore there are no legal venues for claimants today'. The CARICOM-claim regarding reparations for slavery submitted by a number of Caribbean states, as well as demands regarding cultural treasures looted in the late 19th century in different parts of Africa and elsewhere, are clear examples of this phenomenon. Proposed solution for these conflicts almost always circumvent questions of ownership (at the time) or other legal possibilities. They are sought in extra-legal ways. Increased attention for these and similar cases have fueled new research into the histories of slavery and colonialism, and into the provenance of colonial cultural objects in Western museums. Similarly there is an increasing number of research projects that explore, for example, the fate of colonial objects in Europe, in relation to the fate of Nazi-looted art. While the legal limits of current claims form part of the investigation of many of these studies, they often fail to pay serious attention to the relationship between the law and the colonial project itself. Importantly, they also fail to explore the relationship between the law, questions of property and the 'creation' of the colonized subject. This seminar will focus on this nexus and will interrogate the role of law within the colonial era, especially with regard to the legal fashioning of hierarchies of colonial subjects and colonial objects. In what ways is the law implicated the colonial project itself, and what role did it place in the fashioning of colonial subjects and colonial objects? Moreover, what role should an attentiveness at the law play in today's debates around reparation or restitution/ These are some of the key questions that the course will explore. Bringing together readings from legal and political philosophy, material culture and critical heritage studies, this course explores some of the key debates and texts surrounding questions of law, philosophy, colonialism and questions around reparations or restitution of cultural objects. Students will be introduced to the works of some of the key thinkers on which contemporary notions of ownership, the legal subject and (cultural) property are based, probing their genealogy in relation to the racial hierarchies established under the colonial project. We will explore both the history and application of legal frameworks that governed colonial subjects and (cultural) objects alike and their basis in legal philosophy. Is there reason to rethink the role of law within debates around reparations and restitution? And, last but not least: are there reasons to rethink the idea of property itself? What other genealogies of the law can we trace to think differently about ownership of (cultural) property?

Taught by: Modest

Course not offered every year

Activity: Seminar

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 591 Multi-Modal Ethnography: Anthropology Beyond Text

What does the digital age mean for humanistic, social scientific, and professional inquiry and practice? How do non-text based formats - such as film, dance and other kinds of performance, creative writing, and soundscapes - transform both the processes and products of research? How do they inform and transform our disciplines, and what might this mean for the communities with which we work? This advanced undergraduate seminar will address these (and other related) questions. Taught by the invited Fellows from the Center for Experimental Ethnography, this course will take shape differently each semester according to the Fellow's area of expertise and practice. Students will be encouraged to explore alternative formats of representation that move beyond text while still being grounded in ethnographic research, and they will develop skills in relevant media. https://www.sas.upenn.edu/anthropology/courses/topics-courses

Taught by: Varied

One-term course offered either term

Activity: Seminar

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 593 Natural and Cultural Heritage in Global Perspective

This seminar will explore the ideas surrounding the theories, discourses, and practices surrounding natural and cultural heritage. Heritage has become inscribed in the planning of urban and rural landscapes, designed as tourist destinations, and considered a universal good in global cosmopolitan society. But it would be well to ask: what kind of "nature" and "culture" has been labeled as heritage? What kind of organizations, economics, and politics are necessary to sustain it? How are these put in place? By whom? For whom? Over the course of the semester, students will engage with readings that discuss how cultural and natural heritage is communicated to the public and the relationship between academic critique and pragmatic social engagement. This seminar is further grounded by a partnership between the Penn Cultural Heritage Center and the U.S. Mission to UNESCO focused on the assessment of World Heritage Sites, and students will have the opportunity to learn from and participate in specific case studies.

Taught by: Daniels

Course not offered every year

Activity: Seminar

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 598 The Economics of Heritage

Governmental resources for archaeological and heritage sites are declining worldwide while commercial and economic development initiatives are threatening the fabric of heritage and the larger landscape environment to ever greater degrees. As a consequence, the competition for resources to protect and preserve heritage is intensifying, as is the challenge to articulate the value of heritage resources vs. competing commercial or public projects. This is the context for understanding the issues surrounding the definition of the value of cultural heritage assets and the tools available for their measurement and management. This course explores in some depth issues relating to the economic analysis of heritage and culture. It is designed to provide students with a foundational understanding of the economics of heritage-related projects, the tools and techniques available for their analysis and the ethical and practical issues of public policy and private actions that determine the future of heritage resources. Readings and case studies will explore technical, practical and ethical issues that arise in cultural heritageeconomics. Relevant analytical techniques will be introduced and particular emphasis will be placed on commercial, government and community issues unique to heritage-related activities. Special emphasis will be placed upon developing pertinent strategies for the tourist industry. Students will produce one case-study project intended to integrate the technical and practical aspects of the course.

Taught by: Peter Gould

Activity: Seminar

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 600 Contemporary Archaeology in Theory

This graduate seminar addresses contemporary anthropological archaeology and considers the varied ways inferences are made about past and present human behavior from the archaeological record. It reviews such fundamental topics as the use of analogy, Middle Range theory, symbolism and meaning, social and cultural evolution, ideology and power, feminism and gender, and indigenous (non-Western) perspectives. It also foregrounds basic issues regarding heritage, looting, and ethics.

Course usually offered in fall term

Activity: Seminar

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 602 Evolutionary Anthropology

This course will explore various subfields of biological anthropology to better understand what it means to be human. Special attention will be paid to current issues and problems in these subfields, and the different ways in which researchers are attempting to understand and uncover the details of human evolution. Among the areas that are explored in this course are paleoanthropology, primatology, human biology, molecular anthropology, evolutionary medicine, epigenetics, and human life history. Specific issues to be explored include the primate roots of human behavior, brain and language evolution, new fossil hominins, the origins of anatomically modern humans, and modern human migration history.

Taught by: Schurr

Course usually offered in spring term

Activity: Seminar

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 603 Language in Culture and Society

First-year anthropology graduate students or Instructor Permission. Examination of properties of human language which enable social persons to interpret the cultural world and to act within it. Topics include: principles of lexical and grammatical organization; the role of language structure (grammar) and linguistic context (indexicality) in discursive activity; referential uses of language; social interaction; markers of social role, identity, and group-belonging; criteria by which models of linguistic form and function are formulated; the empirical limits within which different models have explanatory value.

Taught by: Agha

Course usually offered in fall term

Activity: Seminar

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 607 Contemporary Native Americans

This course examines the social and political lives of contemporary Native American Indians in the United States and Canada. Topics include: Indigenous identity; homelands and natural resources; popular culture and media; Indigenous arts and cultural expression; museum representations; athletics; gender relations; tribal recognition and sovereignty; and resistance movements. We will consider the origins of federal programs and legislation that have become essential to the protection of Native American freedoms. Students can expect to gain an appreciation of the complexity and cultural diversity of Native communities and tribal nations and insights into their interactions with other cultures over time.

Why are Islam and the Middle East continually in the news in the Western world, and why are Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan the countries that are most frequently named? Fifty years ago, before the terms "Islamism" and "terrorism" were coined, and before we began talking about globalization, things were very different. All three countries had close relations with Europe and America. In this course we will track the various currents of social change that produced the current situation, using the methods and theoretical concepts of anthropology. We will follow the news in the course of the semester and track the way things are continuing to change, so that at the end of the semester we can understand the region and its problems in the context of world history and globalization. Instead of an exam at the end of the semester, you will be asked to write a short essay (1000 words) on a question at the end of January relating to issues we have discussed in class, and again at the end of February and March, and to formulate a research question on a problem that interests you in the history of the area and try to answer it a a final paper by the end of the examination period.

Taught by: Spooner

Course not offered every year

Activity: Seminar

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 617 Contemporary Approaches to the Study of Culture and Society

A critical examination of recent history and theory in cultural and social anthropology. Topics include structural-functionalism; symbolic anthropology; post-modern theory. Emphasis is on major schools and trends in America, Britain, and France.

Course usually offered in spring term

Activity: Seminar

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 620 Directed Reading and Research

To be arranged only by consultation with academic adviser and faculty member(s) to be involved; a proposed syllabus must be presented for approval, and written papers will be required without exception. On approval of these papers one copy must be presented to the Department of Anthropology office for filing. May be repeated for credit.

One-term course offered either term

Activity: Independent Study

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 621 Directed Field Training and Research

To be arranged only by consultation with academic adviser and the faculty member(s) to be involved; a proposed syllabus must be presented for approval and written papers will be required without exception. On approval of these papers, one copy must be presented to the Department of Anthropology office for filing. may be repeated for credit.

One-term course offered either term

Activity: Independent Study

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 626 Intensity

This course examines the manner in which humans encounter the continuous and gradable features of phenomena in social life - sensory qualities of objects, people's aspirations and affect, pitch movement during voiced talk, monsoons and sea breezes, biological growth and environmental degradation, migratory flows in transnational settings - and attempt to evaluate or convert them into discrete dimensions of social life. We examine how intensities and gradients are managed in everyday life as well as in institutional settings - through government policies, scientific protocols, surveillance regimes, infrastructural agendas - and we survey the ways in which everyday and institutional practices reflect and shape each other in societies across the world. In particular, we explore the question of what an anthropology of intensity might look like, and how it may reconfigure approaches to the ethnographic study of human affairs.

Taught by: Carruthers

Activity: Seminar

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 628 Language in Culture and Society: Special Topics

The course is devoted to a single research topic of contemporary interest in linguistic anthropology. Topics vary from year to year. Readings locate current debates in relation to longstanding assumptions in the literature and new directions in contemporary research.

This course is designed to allow graduate students to obtain in-depth training in a scholarly language that will be utilized for dissertation fieldwork and satisfying the language exam for the Department of Anthropology Graduate Program. Through this intensive training in the oral and written forms of a language, students will accelerate their competency in it, while also potentially preparing themselves for advanced language training through tutorials or summer immersion programs.

One-term course offered either term

Activity: Independent Study

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 633 Forensic Anthropology

This course will investigate and discuss the various techniques of analysis that biological anthropologists can apply to forensic cases. Topics include human osteology, the recovery of bodies, the analysis of life history, the reconstruction of causes of death, and various case studies where anthropologists have contributed significantly to solving forensic cases. Discussions will include the limitations of forensic anthropology and the application of DNA recovery to skeletal/mummified materials.

This course will investigate the relationships among women, gender, sexuality, and anthropological research. We will begin by exploring the trajectory of research interest in women and gender, drawing first from the early work on gender and sex by anthropologists like Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict; moving through the 1970s and 1980s arguments about gender, culture, and political economy; arriving at more current concerns with gender, race, sexuality, and empire. For the rest of the semester, we will critically read contemporary ethnographies addressing pressing issues such as nationalism, militarism, neoliberalism and fundamentalism. Throughout, we will investigate what it means not only to "write women's worlds", but also to analyze broader socio-cultural, political, and economic processes through a gendered lens. We will, finally, address the various ways feminist anthropology fundamentally challenged the discipline's epistemological certainties, as well as how it continues to transform our understanding of the foundations of the modern world. Prerequisite: Should have some functional knowledge of Cultural Anthropology.

Iraq: Ancient Cities and Empires is a chronological survey of the ancient civilization that existed in the drainage basin of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers from the early settled village farming communities of the 7th millennium BCE to the middle of the 1st millennium BCE, when Nebuchadnezzar II ruled Babylon and much of the Middle East. Though organized period by period, NELC 241 explores various social, political, economic, and ideological topics, exposing students to various strands of evidence, including settlement survey data, excavated architectural remains, artifacts, and documentary sources, as well as an eclectic mix of theoretical perspectives. The course aims to provide students with a strong foundation for the further study of the ancient and pre-modern Middle East.

Globalization is one of the most comprehensive topics of our time, and also one of the most controversial. This course assesses the current state of globalization, considering it in terms of economic, political, and cultural change, and follows its progress through the semester. The class will be led through the main topics and debates, introduced to conceptual and empirical tools for framing academic discussion and research about its dynamics, how and when it began, and (most particularly) how it differs from earlier episodes of historical change.

Taught by: Spooner

Course not offered every year

Activity: Seminar

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 649 Molecular Anthropology

In this course, we will explore the molecular revolution in biological anthropology. In particular, we will examine how molecular data can be used to illuminate anthropological question concerning human origins, evolution and biological variation. Some of the specific topics to be covered in this course are the phylogenetic relationships among primates, kinship in apes and monkeys, the hominoid trichotomy, modern human origins and migrations, Neanderthal and Denisovan admixture with modern humans, biogenetics of skin color, and physiological, phenotypic and disease adaptations.

This course relates anthropological models and methods to current problems in the Modern World. The overall objective is to show how the research findings and analytical concepts of anthropology may be used to illuminate and explain events as they have unfolded in the recent news and in the course of the semester. Each edition of the course will focus on a particular country or region that has been in the news.

This course is designed for third- and fourth-year graduate students in anthropology who are working on their dissertation research proposals and submitting grants. Graduate students from other departments who will be submitting grant proposals that include an ethnographic component are also welcome. Students will develop their proposals throughout the course of the semester, and will meet important fall submission deadlines. They will begin by working with various databases to search funding sources relevant to the research they plan to conduct. In class sessions, they will also work with the professor and their peers to refine their research questions, their methods, the relationship of any previous research to their dissertation fieldwork, and the broader theoretical and "real-world" significance of their proposed projects. Finally, students will also have the opportunity to have live "chats" with representatives from funding agencies, thereby gaining a better sense of what particular foundations are looking for in a proposal.

Taught by: Thomas

Course usually offered in fall term

Activity: Seminar

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 658 Discourse-Centered Research Seminar

This seminar explores the interface between discourse, culture, and social processes. It is designed for graduate students in anthropology and related disciplines who (1) wish to study the current literature in linguistic anthropology concerned with discourse-centered approaches to culture; and (2) themselves have or will acquire during the semester discourse materials (texts, recordings, ethnographic data, etc.) that they wish to analyze from an anthropological point view. The instructor will spend time discussing his own past and current research. Class sessions will also include discussion of the writings of contemporary anthropologists investigating culture through discourse. The seminar is designed for maximum flexibility in accommodating students' research interests and needs.

Taught by: Urban

One-term course offered either term

Activity: Seminar

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 663 Independent Study in South Asian Archaeology

This course provides a broad overview of the archaeology and early history of South Asia, a region that includes present-day India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Myanmar, Bhutan, and the Maldives. Beginning with a brief overview of the Paleolithic, we will discuss the multiple origins of early agriculture, the development of early states in the Indus river basin and beyond, the second urbanization, the expansion of institutionalized forms of religion, long-distance trade, social differentiation, and the rise of states as empires. No background in archaeology is required. The class will produce a collaborate spatial database of archaeological sites for selected time periods and will produce a document describing some of the major historical changes in South Asia as illustrated by the archaeological database.

Taught by: Morrison

Course not offered every year

Activity: Independent Study

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 670 Research Design

This is a practical course on the challenges of designing research projects in anthropology with a special focus on the dissertation project. We will discuss how to select and refine a topic that is, ideally, important without being impossible. Interesting research can often be described or understood in multiple ways, and we will practice recasting project proposals for different kinds of audiences and formats. We will also consider issues of methodology, or the logic of method. Specific kinds of questions tend to lead to specific field and lab methods, and it is important to match your questions to your ways of answering them. This is not, however, a methods course. If you need to learn ethnography, ceramic analysis, textual analysis or some other set of methods, you should look for specific instruction in that field. Instead, we will consider how to assemble a research project that is well-structured, significant, and feasible using one or more analytical strategies. Research design is critical not only for planning research appropriate to your questions but also serves as the basis for successful proposals. Proposal-writing is a specific genre you will need to master; the final product for this course is therefore a research proposal. We will discuss the format of the proposal in detail. Not all proposals need to follow the same template, but there is a family resemblance to successful proposals; thus, although we will follow advice for writing scientific proposals, more humanistically-oriented students should not find this to be a problem.

Taught by: Morrison

Course not offered every year

Activity: Seminar

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 677 Black Speculative Futures

Why do black cultural producers turn to the speculative? What, in turn, is speculative about blackness? These questions frame this seminar s exploration of how black artists, theorists, and activists imagine different futures, often in the service of critiquing power asymmetries and creating radical transformation in the present. We will explore how the speculative works differently across black literature, visual culture and performance. Additionally, inspired by the multi-disciplinary work that we encounter in the course, we will experiment with crafting our own embodied speculative art in order to better understand its function as both art practice and politics. The course will be divided between discussions centered on close reading of primary and secondary material and creative writing/movement exploration (no previous movement experience necessary). Occasional guest lectures with visiting artists will provide additional fodder for our critical and creative work.

Anthropologists have never found a society that did not have ideas, rituals and practice that falls easily into our category of "religion" (a term coined in Roman times to cover everything relating to assumptions about supernatural forces in any cultural context). So how can we define religion now, over two thousand years since the end of the "Axial Age" (800-200 BCE) that produced all the major religious ideas, that would allow us to include all the forms we know not only of Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam, but also Confucianism, Hinduism, Jainism, Shinto, Sikhism, Taoism, and Zoroastrianism, and the religions of the small isolated communities we found during the colonial period in Africa and Australia? And why has religious practice been declining in the Western world since the middle of the 20th century? Is the anthropology of religion a different subject now than what it was a hundred years ago? The religions that we know historically, because they are based on texts, especially Christianity and Islam, have obviously changed in many ways since their early days, and it is easy to see a relationship between the way they changed and what was going on in the societies that carried them: Christianity spread through the Roman Empire; Islam spread from Mesopotamia along trade routes, west to Egypt and North Africa, and east into central Asia and north China. It will be interesting to study the various constituents of religion (e.g. Faith, Law, Authority, Ritual, Sacraments, morality, spirituality) comparatively between each of the religions for which we have sufficient data, religious wars, and see the historical significance of (for example) the French Revolution, the Pope, and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Taught by: Spooner

Course not offered every year

Activity: Seminar

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 704 Culture/Power/Subjectivities

This doctoral level course will introduce students to a conceptual language and theoretical tools for analyzing and explaining the complex intersection of racialized, ethnic, gendered, sexual, and classed differences and asymmetrical social relations. The students will examine critically the interrelationships between culture, power, and subjectivity through a close reading of classical and contemporary social theory. Emphasis will be given to assessing the power of various theories for conceptualizing and explaining mechanisms of social stratification as well as the basis of social order and processes of social change.

This interdisciplinary course introduces graduate students to both classic and more recent theoretical frameworks used in understanding and analyzing society, culture, and the state, with particular reference to South Asia. Topics include bureaucracy and the state; power and performance; hierarchy and individualism; caste, community, and domination; money and markets; credit and debt; globalization and consumption; economic liberalization and political transformations; local and trans-local contexts of meaning; the environment, politics, and urban and rural ecologies; and culture and the changing shape of politics. Particular emphasis will be placed on the ways in which recent ethnographic and historical monographs have positioned their interventions in relation to broader debates and scholarship, both within scholarship on South Asia and more generally.

This course is designed to follow after Ethnographic Research Methods (EDUC 721). In the introductory course, students learned how to use qualitative methods in conducting a brief field study. This advanced level course focuses on research design and specifically the craft of ethnographic research. Students will apply what they learn in the course in writing a proposal for a dissertation research project. Prerequisite: Must have completed EDUC 721 or equivalent introductory qualitative methods course.

This is a parallel course to ANTH 219, but on the graduate level. It will only be open to select graduate students (i.e. historical archaeology students and some CGS MA students). Specific permission of the instructor is required in each case.

Follow-up for ANTH 719 and parallel course to ANTH 220. Class will meet in three hour sections on Fridays and Saturdays and will involve the analysis of artifacts, documentary records, oral historic sources and period illustrations collected on Southern New Jersey historic sites that Fall. No previous archaeological or lab experience is required. (Robert L. Schuyler: schuyler@sas.upenn.edu; (215) 898-6965; UMuseum 412). Course may be repeated for credit.

The course is designed for students and faculty interested in discussing current research and/or research topics in any area of linguistic or semiotic anthropology. The primary intent of the course is to familiarize students with the literature on selected research topics and to develop their own research agendas in the light of the literature. Students may enroll on an S/U basis for 0.5 CU per semester. The course may be repeated for credit up to 4 times.

This graduate seminar is a full year course open to second year anthropology graduate students. Other interested students should contact the instructors for permission before enrolling. Topic changes each year, corresponding to the Penn Anthropology Department Colloquium series.

Two terms. student may enter either term.

Activity: Seminar

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 741 Anthropology of Affect

This course draws upon three anthropological literatures pertaining to affect. One, growing out of Darwin's observations in The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, looks at the evolutionary and neurobiological bases of affect. A second developed in connection with psychoanalysis, and centers upon insights gained through empathic and introspective processes. A third arose with cultural studies and reactions within anthropology to structuralism, including research on cross-cultural variation in the conceptualization of emotions. The course is appropriate for graduate students interested in exploring the linkages among these literatures, and who envision or are already actively undertaking research for which knowledge of them is pertinent. Students will be expected to lead discussions of specific works, as well as present aspects of their own present or proposed future research. Students outside of the Anthropology Department should contact the instructor to request a permit.

Taught by: Urban

Course not offered every year

Activity: Seminar

1.0 Course Unit

ANTH 751 Historical Archaeology

Archaeology of the Modern World from the Columbian voyage (1492) to the 20th century. Topics such as the rise of early modern Europe, European exploration and colonization, African American Archaeology, Asian American Archaeology, the rise of colonial society, contact with native peoples, the Industrial Revolution, and the archaeology of the 20th century will be covered.

Over the last fifty years archaeologists have been exploring historic sites in the United States dating from both the Colonial Period and the 19th/20th centuries. What can archaeology now tell us about the origins of American society, the invasion of North America by various European peoples (Spanish, English, Dutch), the impact on native peoples, the rise of African American and Asian American cultures, major crisis (e.g. the revolution, Civil War, and the Great Depression), the settlement of the Far American West, and the final emergence of a truly national culture in the 20th century? A basic question will be how an American history based on both archaeology and archival sources is different and more complete than an image of the past drawn only from written sources.